Lloyds Bank customers may soon be able to use their contactless debit card as a way of securely authenticating their identity when setting up the mobile banking app on an NFC-enabled device.
The ‘tap to bank’ technology has so far been tested on over 125 people, replacing the standard call-to-mobile procedure with a simple tap of the debit card. The bank says that in the future, the application could be extended to other tasks, such as authenticating new payments.
Director of innovation and digital development, Marc Lien says: “With the widespread take up of contactless cards and most new smartphones now having NFC technology, this tap to bank trial is developing enhancements to banking processes that many people could benefit from."
In a similar vein, the bank is replacing automated phone calls to authorise certain desktop banking transactions by a log into the mobile banking app to verify their requests.
This process is available for customers setting up new beneficiaries, setting up standing orders, making international payments and resetting passwords via their Internet Banking on desktop.
Lloyds says customer authentication on these transactions are a lot quicker than the current automated phone call, now taking less than 20 seconds to complete.
Lloyds Bank currently has around 2.5m active mobile banking customers - with over 1.5 million customers downloading the app - and over 10 million active online banking users. The bank recorded over one billion log ins to its online banking site in the past 12 months.