Singapore’s OCBC Bank wants to use Siri to help corporates do their banking.
OCBC said in an announcement on Wednesday (Oct. 4) that it is integrating its Business Mobile Banking app with Apple’s voice assistant Siri for more than 120,000 corporate customers. The integration means professionals will be able to initiate B2B payments and funds transfers to other OCBC business accounts using Siri voice commands.
The solution will be made available next week.
According to the financial institution (FI), small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) will particularly benefit from the capability. Users need to tell Siri via voice command who to send a payment to, and how much they want to send, in order to initiate a payment. SMBs can also ask Siri for account balances.
Validation for these commands will require a fingerprint scan authentication (OCBC One Touch) as well as OCBC’s One Time Passwords sent via text message.
“We are pleased to be leading the charge in Asia in introducing voice banking to our business customers,” said OCBC Head of Global Commercial Banking, Linus Goh, in a statement. “SME business owners are time-starved and constantly on the go, and we believe these innovative solutions based on voice recognition technology will vastly improve the way in which our customers manage their everyday business banking needs.”
“We started a journey with our SME customers more than a decade ago to deliver simple, fast and convenient banking services and continue to collaborate with them today to challenge the way banking is served, offering a glimpse of the future of banking in a digital world,” the executive continued. “This launch of voice banking signals the beginning of a new wave of digital services that we will deliver for our business customers.”
According to the bank, OCBC became the first FI to offer a B2B mobile banking app with integrated biometric authentication, such as fingerprint scans using OCBC One Touch, a solution that utilizes the Touch ID feature on iPhones. Integrating Apple’s voice assistant Siri is part of the bank’s efforts to participate in Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative, the FI noted.
OCBC first enabled voice-powered payments using Siri last year, but the tool was only for consumer transactions.
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