Two Australian banks unveiled updates to their banking services with ANZ Bank launching a voice-based identity service for mobile banking and National Australia Bank (NAB) debuting a chatbot for its business banking service.
The Voice ID service, developed in partnership with biometrics firm Nuance, enables ANZ customers to make payments of more than A$1000 (or BPAY payments of more than A$10,000) via their mobile using voice recognition.
“Customers increasingly want the convenience of banking on their digital devices and this solution delivers that with the added level of voice biometric security," said managing director, Custoemr Experience and Digital Channels, Peter Dalton. "This will be particularly good news for our small business customers who regularly need to make payments of more than $1000 on the go and will only need their voice to authorise those transactions.”
Meanwhile NAB is piloting a chatbot described as a “digital virtual banker” for its business customers.
According to the bank, the virutal assistant can provide answers to more than 13,000 variations on 200 questions based on informaiton taken from genuine customer enquiries. It is currently focused on queries related to business credit and debit cards.
“Our research shows that two thirds of Australian SMEs cite dealing with administrative tasks as taking a lot of effort, and our customers desperately want to spend more time on their business and less time on dealing with admin tasks,” said NAB chief operating officer Antony Cahill.
Cahill said that the bank plans to continue developing its chatbot over the coming months and to add to the knowledge bank used to drive its decision-making.