This is one of the most tricky elements of mobile banking. This is where mobile banking systems integrate with mobile operator infrastructure and where the intricacies of telecommunications must be dealt with in such a way that financial transactions can be processed without losing accuracy. It is in this layer where a mobile phone number (or an identifier in the telecommunication world) is mapped to a banking number. The procedures for the establishment and maintenance of this link is often complex and should cater for many different scenarios.
A well designed mCommerce layer should also cater for risk management elements (like functionality available to specific profiles or daily and transaction limits). This is especially important in multi-channel deployments. This layer must be able to allow (for instance) a balance enquiry from a SMS channel with only CLI security but at the same time person to person payment with PIN encryption from a SIM Toolkit channel. In order to effectively be able to deploy this functionality proper mapping of profiles and access matrices is essential. This component must enable the operator of the system to present different options/menus to different people by making small parameter adjustments.
Often this component is grouped with the mobile channel layer (especially in the case where only one channel is supported or when the solution is inflexible in working with alternative channel providers). Grouping this component with the Channel management is often referred to as a wallet system as sufficient information must be stored to be able to process and route financial instructions to financial back offices systems. More than 75% of mobile banking vendors specialise in the provision of only these two components with at best limited features that could be classified as belonging to the remaining three components.