Singapore’s OCBC has become the first bank in Asia to enable secure payments using Apple’s Siri and iMessage.
Customers of the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC) can now send money by issuing a simple voice command to Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant, the bank said in a statement. OCBC Chief Executive Samuel Tsien is keen on the adoption of financial technology at his bank.
Users just have to tell Siri whom to send the payment to and how much they want to send, then use the OCBC Pay Anyone mobile e- payment service. The service integrates with Siri and iMessage to enable peer-to-peer payments powered by voice and messaging technology.
Rise in Popularity of e-payments
Another new channel for customers to conveniently send money to friends is through iMessage: If midway through texting, they need not even leave the conversation screen or open any other mobile app.
OCBC Pay Anyone lets customers send money directly to any bank account in Singapore using just the recipient’s mobile number, email address or Facebook account, without having to perform transaction signing using a security token or to add the recipient as a “payee”. It was first launched in 2014 on the OCBC Mobile Banking app.
Five Fold Increase
In September 2016, OCBC Bank increased the daily transfer limit on OCBC Pay Anyone from $100 to $1,000, bringing greater convenience to customers and making payments for bigger ticket items more seamless. OCBC Pay Anyone transactions have increased five-fold, with an average month-on-month growth of about 10 per cent since August 2014.
«We know that customers now prefer their banking to be embedded in other things they do, rather than having to start their interaction journey from a bank’s platform. We’re pleased to add these two new channels Siri and iMessage,» said Aditya Gupta, OCBC Bank’s Head of E-Business.
