Optimized USSD Protocol for Financial Transactions

Abstract

Mobile banking is on the increase, in terms of both the number of people using it and the variety of transactions being carried out. This is leading to a requirement for greater security in the authorization of mobile customers and greater integrity in their banking sessions. With the intension of allowing banks to extend their reach across the pyramid of Socio Economic groups, many companies have introduced a vast array of innovative technology solutions for the banking and financial sector. The proposed optimized Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) financial transaction solution will address security aspects, efficiency and the effectiveness in the transaction completion in order to deliver a better service to customer and bank/financial institution. The system will be designed in such a way that it would be able to execute almost every banking transaction that a particular bank branch could provide to the customer. The system mainly addresses the multiple components such as transaction initiation, end to end encryption and the two factor authentication for the transactions. In a more abstract level this optimized USSD protocol facilitate to perform transactions such as Balance Inquiry, Fund Transfer and Utility Bill Payments which should update bank account instantly in a more reliable and secure way. All the security features with secure key generation, key transferring and key storing are done in a very secure manner. Finally end to end encryption and the two factor authentication for the transactions are also facilitating with this solution.