OCBC Bank Adds Face ID to its Mobile Operations

Biometric security can be an amazing thing; an authentication system that literally responds only to you, is extremely difficult to fool—in some cases, anyway—and depends on things that you constantly have on hand like your eyes, fingerprints and voice. A bank in Singapore, OCBC, is bringing biometric security to its mobile operations by way of Face ID.

The OCBC mobile operations getting Face ID security include not only OCBC Mobile Banking, but also OCBC Pay Anyone—its mobile payments operations—and OCBC OneWealth along with OCBC Business Mobile Banking. The downside here is that, in order to use such tools, users will first have to own an iPhone X. Those who do, however, will be able to access a variety of information points about their banking operations, from credit cards to investments.

This isn’t the first time that OCBC has stepped up its operations on this front; it actually brought out an Apple Touch ID-based system as well, allowing its customers to authenticate by fingerprint.

OCBC’s head of E-Business in Singapore, Aditya Gupta, commented “There’s a whole generation of customers becoming more comfortable with biometric authentication technology, and we are confident that they will find OCBC OneLook truly impressive and relevant. So, bye-bye fingers, hello faces!”

Some here might wonder if that means that the company will no longer allow users to put the Touch ID system to work, but there’s nothing to indicate that’s the case. Others might express some skepticism that a bank would use what amounts to a consumer-grade security measure to protect banking information, but then, it’s not out of line to suggest that Touch ID is sufficiently potent a protection measure to handle security. I’m not sure I’d want my accounts protected by Touch ID, but biometrics can certainly be a powerful answer to the ongoing security question.

It’s going to take some time to see how this all works out, but it’s a safe bet that OCBC’s customer base will jump on this fairly quickly. At least, that part of it that has the latest iPhone. It will be interesting to see how many of them are happy about the move.