Bank needs a password? Let me take a selfie!

In a fast-changing world where financial institutions are working hard to keep up and stay afloat, mobile banking is becoming more personalised and secure than ever. As the range of mobile services expands to make life as easy for consumers as possible, accessing banking amenities digitally is becoming something of a norm. And when you can snap cheques to make deposits, how can selfies as passwords be far behind?

 

Selfie identification

As if self-obsession to benefit the world wasn’t enough, payment solutions giant MasterCard introduced Selfie Pay to the US and the Netherlands, as well as the UK to gain traction in the dynamic area of authentication services. “We want to identify people for who they are, not for what they remember,” says Ajay Bhalla, President of Enterprise Safety and Security at MasterCard, about the technology. The facial recognition system can be used to complete online transactions without the need for codes or passwords and will become available in 14 other countries in the summer. It will use a stored picture of the consumer to complete the ID verification. 

 

Elsewhere, FacePhi, the facial recognition specialists based in Spain, rolled out a similar mobile banking software called Selphi at the Mobile World Congress last month, with the slogan “you blink, you’re in”. It claims to have designed the most developed liveness detector in the market.

 

Banking on biometrics

Last month, HSBC and Leeds-based First Direct — an online and telephone only bank, and subsidiary of HSBC — announced a new voice and fingerprint identification system for mobile banking in the UK. Massachusetts-based tech corporation Nuance Communications, which is responsible for developing the voice recognition software, will put together a matrix of more than 100 unique identifiers, including behaviour, pronunciation, cadence as well as physical features such as the shape of the larynx and vocal tracts. Ease of usage — especially when it comes to the annoyance of forgetting passwords — aside, the combination of individual attributes will make it virtually impossible to mimic users. The fingerprint ID system will be available to all consumers using an iPhone 5S or newer with the bank’s mobile banking app Contactless payments will be the norm in the future, as financial institutions, merchants, consumers, tech vendors and carriers adopt newer technologies to bank safely and effectively. For example, Barclays uses vein-reading technology for business customers for transactions.

 

Meanwhile, MasterCard is working on other unique identification methods, such as reading heartbeats of consumers via wearables, to make digital payments as seamless and risk-free as possible.

 

Skype your banker

Although in discussion for a while now, facilitating customer support through video conferencing is on the radar of the world’s biggest banks. Moving away from the traditional nine-to-five model of banking services provided at physical branches, more and more banks are offering video banking apps that enable consumers to access services 24x7. One such example is ICICI Bank’s Video Banking app for wealthy clients, which allows you to speak to customer care reps anytime, anywhere with a smartphone. 

 

A Cisco report states that there are four major areas in which retail banks have the opportunity to use video for retail or small business customers with remote solutions: advisers, private banking, concierge and business-to-business meetings. HSBC provides video conferencing solutions for opening business accounts by linking potential consumers to specialist advisers.

 

An eye for money

Bigwig multinational Citi is paving the way for futuristic banking through its ambitious eye-scanning ATMs in collaboration with ATM-maker Diebold. Called Irving, the process would reduce the time taken to withdraw cash to a meagre ten seconds. But at the centre of it all is the mobile banking app that makes this possible. So, you enter the amount you need to withdraw into the app, and when you reach the machine, it scans your iris and spits out the amount you’ve previously entered. 

 

However, any form of mass roll-out is still years away, considering that a huge number of machines will have to be produced and linked securely. As a precursor, cardless transactions are gaining ground, with banks such as JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America in the process of introducing thousands of such ATMs, where the need for a debit card will eventually become moot. Several technologies make cardless withdrawals possible. For instance, Bank of Montreal relies on a QR code system and offers the facility at all its cash machines, while UAE-based Mashreq allows you to withdraw cash after you’ve entered the amount online and received a unique ATM code on your smartphone. 

 

If this sounds a bit clunky, Chase’s NFC-equipped e-ATMs, planned to launch later this year, will allow smartphones to communicate directly with cash machines, making withdrawals seamless and super quick.