Australia is in the search of alternative ways of payment

In attempt to avoid bulls, fund houses tried to make arrangements to find alternative ways of payment that will help individuals to make mutual fund investments. At present time a dominant part of fund houses are in advanced stages of launching services by means of which they will be able to benefit by mutual fund investments using of credit cards and making mobile payments.

"At least two players are almost ready to offer payments via credit cards," said M N Srinivasu, director of BillDesk that facilitates the payments channel for mutual funds among many other industries.

The difficulty for mutual funds has been presented at the costs of transactions, due to which mutual funds were not able to accept credit card payments.

From each transaction, made by mutual funds, credit card company enters 2% in its own account, when the broker gets about 2.25%.

For the same reason life insurance companies can't permit themselves to enlarge credit card payment channel. Only few of them have an access to that system.

Fund houses had been already received the demand for reduced costs as credit card industry would be benefited in terms of number and value of transactions.

In this case, payments via mobile phones build fast-growing mutual fund industry with a great success . One of the mobile payments providers called mCheck is already about to make agreements with several fund houses about launching such a facility within few weeks, according to Sanjay Swamy, chief executive officer of mCheck.

Clients of ICICI Prudential Life Insurance and Reliance Life Insurance Companies can already avail themselves of the offer to make mobile payments. As for the foreign insurance giant, it is expected to enable its clients with the same facility soon.

In general insurance, the payments via credit cards have gone down well as they are just one-time payments.

In mutual fund and insurance sectors, the credit card or mobile payments may or may not necessarily be first-time payments. It remains to be seen how fund houses meet the KYC requirements that mutual fund regulators ask for.