Citigroup rolling out voice recognition for retail customers in Asia

According to a report by Bloomberg, Citigroup Inc will be the first major bank in Asia to bring voice recognition technology to its retail customers and plans to have at least one million clients in Asia using the technology within the next 12 months

Citigroup will roll out the voice recognition technology in Singapore first, followed by Australia, Hong Kong, India and Taiwan over the next few months.

Anand Selvakesari, Citigroup’s Singapore-based consumer banking head for Asia Pacific, said that about 95% of Citigroup’s retail banking transactions in the region take place outside the branch network.

“The new technology will allow Citigroup’s Asian customer service division, which receives about 35 million customer calls every year, to cut the average time it takes to validate a client’s identity over the phone to 15 seconds, from 45 seconds previously,” said Selvakesari.

Earlier this year, Tony Chew, Citibank’s global head of cybersecurity regulatory strategy, spoke at the EmTech Asia 2016 conference and emphasized the need for Asian banks to adopt biometric authentication solutions for mobile users instead of using PINs and SMS-based OTPs (one-time passwords).

According to the Biometrics Research Group, the financial services sector has emerged as a primary end-user market for biometrics technology worldwide. By the end of 2016, the firm believe that revenue will continue to increase to US$2.2 billion and estimates that the financial biometrics market will eventually account for almost a third of total biometrics market revenues globally by 2020.

Article Topics

Asia  |  banking  |  biometric authentication  |  biometrics  |  voice recognition