Singaporean bank OCBC claims to be the first with two new fintech initiatives in the city-state. There's one caveat though: you need a brand new phone to use one of the two new products.
Singapore's second-largest bank launched OCBC OneLook, the first service in the city-state that lets customers use just their faces to access banking apps on the newly launched Apple iPhone X, according to a press release released today. OCBC also tapped artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to combat financial crime.
At Ease With Biometric Technology
By leveraging Apple’s Face ID facial recognition technology, OCBC customers who have the new phone can now dispense with passwords or fingerprints. More than 120,000 Singapore-registered users of OCBC's business internet banking portal, Velocity@ocbc, also stand to benefit from this enhancement.
Aditya Gupta, head of E-Business Singapore at OCBC, believes there is now a whole generation of customers becoming more comfortable with biometric authentication technology.
Faster and More Efficient
In its second «first» to tackle the increasing scale and complexity of anti-money laundering (AML) monitoring, OCBC's transaction monitoring team and its fintech unit, «The Open Vault at OCBC», conducted a proof of concept with financial technology company, ThetaRay, which concluded earlier this year.
In the proof of concept stage, the technology was used to analyze one year’s worth of OCBC's corporate banking transaction data. The findings showed that it was able to reduce the number of alerts that did not require further review, by 35 percent.
Through the categorization of flagged transactions by their risk levels, the accuracy rate of identifying suspicious transactions, also increased by more than four times. The bank is now in an extended proof of concept and pre-implementation phase, involving advanced testing with additional test data.
