MANILA, Philippines – Stuck in traffic with P1 load left in your prepaid phone and lots of phone calls to make? Need to have cooking gas, medicine, a gallon of water or dinner sent to your home, but you forgot to leave some cash? What about reloading your roaming prepaid card while you’re traveling overseas? Citibank’s new mobile phone banking service has now replaced credit card swiping with a text message or a phone call.

Citibank, the world’s largest credit card issuer, could have launched this product anywhere else in the world. But country business manager Mark Jones said Citi Mobile was introduced first in the Philippines because of Filipinos’ penchant to send an average of 12 to 15 text messages per day.

“The Philippines has been called the text capital of the world, and the continued popularity of SMS presented us an opportunity to introduce Citi Mobile,” Jones said.

In 2007, there were one billion mobile phone service subscribers globally and 53 million lived in the Philippines, Citibank said. Filipinos sent 1.5 trillion messages in 2007, more than half the 2.3 trillion text messages sent globally on the same year. Around 95 percent of Filipino subscribers used prepaid phone subscriptions.

Citi’s country offices around the world will be watching closely how the Philippine market will respond to the new channel. So far, mobile banking anywhere in the world has not really caught on, and Citibank believes that’s because of the nature of service available.

“No one has ever really introduced something like this, where you can charge something to your credit card just by texting or calling a merchant. But since we embrace anything that we can do with the mobile phone, they (Citibank country offices) will be looking at the response,” says Cecille Fonacier, Citi Phils., eConsumer business director.

It doesn’t sound like much of a service if you’re in the office near a landline or facing your laptop where you can make online purchases and see all your choices. But not for a working mother who discovered that cooking gas has run out when she’s stuck in the office, or for a father who’s car battery has died in the middle of the national highway. Plus, they only need to shell out the money when the credit card bill arrives, giving them a few days of free cash if they are not revolvers.

Filipinos working overseas can also reload their mobile phones, send phone credits to their family and deliver flowers or cakes to them via their mobile phones -- all the time earning rewards points for the purchases. Citibank hopes that by making the service “telco agnostic” and convenient, the service can raise mobile phone technology users from 100,000 currently to 1.2 million.

“Some things you have to physically see and touch before you pay for them with your credit cards, but for deliveries and mobile phone loads, we more or less trust them already,” Fonacier said.