SMS Itaú (SMS Bidirecional) Qorus Banking Innovation Awards 2014

The bidirectional SMS, is the point of communication between two ends via SMS. Through pre-stablished words, customers can send SMS inquiring for specific information about their account or credit card. Market data indicates that today there are approximately 264 million cellphones in Brazil. From these, 78% are denominated feature phones, which are simple mobile devises with much less functionalities than a smart phone. Social classes C, D and E possess 60, 2% of these devices. Given this scenario, Banco Itaú makes available for costumers new functionalities via Bidirectional SMS, enabling customers with simpler cell phones (which lack of the use of applications for example) to receive information about their current account or credit card in a practical and faster way. For example, sending a SMS with the word “account balance” to the number 4828, and in seconds receiving an answer featuring the current account balance. Other services available via SMS are summary of current account extracts, recharge of Pré Pago cell phone credit and credit card services. In August 2014, more than 800K customers used the SMS Itaú service, representing a 307% growth over the month of March in the same year. Since April of 2014, a multidisciplinary Cell with a Lean methodology has administrated the SMS Itaú service, giving more agility to implantations, incentives and improvements to the Channel.