Alibaba and TAS partner to bring facial and voice recognition to Australian financial sector

Alibaba Cloud and Australian technology provider TAS have formed a partnership to bring Alibaba’s facial recognition, artificial intelligence, and data analytics, as well as cloud computing and data center services to the country’s financial services sector, the Australian China Business Review reports.

The companies will also create a joint innovation center to develop and tailor new technologies for the Australian market.

“This market is a very mature cloud market and very open and very eager for digital transformation, especially for the financial sector – Australia’s financial sector has a huge potential to adopt new technology like facial recognition and big data support,” Alibaba Cloud ASEAN and Australia-New Zealand General Manager Raymond Ma told the Review. “Our partner can help us lend our experience of best practice in the financial sector in China to this market.”

Ma also said the company had been looking for a local partner to help roll out its technology since it established a data center in Australia in 2016.

TAS CEO Shane Baker told the Review that the Alipay payment platform is the most attractive Alibaba technology for his company’s customers.

“This is about how we advance the industry, and things like facial recognition and voice recognition are certainly seen to be the future in that we will be communicating with technology in that fashion,” Baker said. “So those technologies were one of the biggest considerations in terms of selecting a partner.”

Baker believes that insurance companies will join banks in adopting Aliababa’s technologies to streamline processes and improve customer engagement.

Australian banks have been moving steadily toward wide adoption of biometrics, with Visa detailing a strategy to support infrastructure and policy development to that end in 2017, and the Australia and New Zealand Banking Group moving to add voice biometrics to its call centers. The country is also considering offering its facial verification service to businesses.

Article Topics

AI  |  Alibaba Group  |  Australia  |  biometrics  |  cloud services  |  facial recognition