Wells Fargo to usher in voice and facial biometrics for mobile corporate access

Wells Fargo is to pilot a fusion of voice and face biometrics to authenticate mobile users of its Commercial Electronics Office (CEO) portal.

The new biometric identification feature is being rolled-out to CEO Mobile iPhone app users in 2016. The bank says that identifying a combination of customers’ faces, voices, and mobile devices will make it extremely difficult for bad actors to spoof the true user.

“Biometric technology is emerging and accelerating change in financial services,” says Danny Peltz, executive vice president and head of treasury management at Wells Fargo. “We continue to explore and test new safeguards for our business customers.”

Currently, the bank is also testing another biometric authentication technology that scans the veins of smartphone users’ eyes to verify their identity. This additional security will also be available to CEO Mobile iPhone app users in 2016.

The new comes as the bank unveils a suite of redesigned treasury management applications, including information reporting and fraud prevention, across the full CEO portal suite, including smartphones, tablets and desktop.

The announcement coincides with the 15-year anniversary this month of the CEO portal, which now provides 90-plus online service to commercial, corporate, and institutional customers in more than 190 countries.

“Over the last 15 years, we’ve seen dramatic changes in technology and the way our customers do business ― it’s not just through their desktops anymore,” says Steve Ellis, executive vice president and group head of wholesale services at Wells Fargo. “We’re continuing to invest in new technology to make banking easier and more secure for our customers who need to connect with many types of devices.”

He says the bank’s active mobile business users have grown by more than 97% in just the past year.

“Our proprietary technology recognises our customers, the devices they’re using, anticipates their financial needs, and delivers the right results,” says Ellis.

Related Companies

Wells Fargo

Channels

Security Payments Wholesale banking

Keywords

Mobile & online banking Transaction banking Biometrics

Comments: (1)

A Finextra member 29 June, 2015, 05:35

1 like

Biometrics is the future of security...it has already recahed a certain level inpure application today. Thanks to Hollywood biometrics featured in Star Trek and other movies are now a reality.Every human being has a few unique traits. Biometrics uses these unique features of humans as an identifier.

Biometrics is the key to the future of security and identification in the Banking and Financial Services (BFSI) or rather say “Power of One”. The use of Biometrics has already started in and is being adopted pretty fast in the industry. Finger prints, Retina recognition etc. were things that has been adopted by the BFSI sector in the last few years but Apple has changed the game. As a part of the hardware based finger print recognition it has taken care of the two factor authentication process and procedures in a really elegant way without much hassle. Today most of the Banks across the globe have used these features to offer more and more financial services to its customers.

We have already seen, finger impressions on an ATM machine replacing the need for cards to withdraw money, same with the retina scan and also voice controlled commands.

As we all know hardware biometrics are difficult to tamper with compared to other software biometric products. As I had stated in one of my previous interviews the best of Biometric recognition techniques is yet to come.

The most important thing being that biometrics is not replicable and thus offers a very high level of security. The good thing about biometrics is, it is actually like running a scan on one’s body. The devices needs to see the flow of blood and other aspects to ensure that the authentication is done by a live person and that it is just not body parts.

This gives rise to a very important concept that every person is unique with his/her own traits and genetic code which allows biometrics again to be unique. The Banks will soon learn that since biometrics for each individual is unique, the need of a person for banking products is also unique and that is the power of oneself.