OCBC Bank claims to be the first bank in Asia to enable voice transactions via Apple's virtual assistant Siri and in-app with iMessage.
The Siri and iMessage services for OCBC's Pay Anyone P2P mobile app are available to customers using iPhone devices running the iOS10 software.
To send money using Siri, users simply need to instruct the virtual agent with a voice command indicating whom from their contact list to send money to, and the amount to send. On iMessage, the ability to send payments operates in-app via the conversation screen with no interruption to the group chat.
Aditya Gupta, OCBC Bank’s head of e-business Singapore, says: “We know that customers now prefer their banking to be embedded in other things they do, rather than having to start their interaction journey from a bank’s platform. We are integrating payments into our customers’ everyday lives and making it completely frictionless for them to engage us via actions that are second nature to them - using messaging and voice commands.
The bank last month increased the OCBC Pay Anyone daily transfer limit from $100 to $1,000. "Since then, the amount of money being sent via our e-payment service has increased 250 per cent," adds Gupta. "We expect e-payments to have a multi-fold increase and will continue to add more payment channels for customers to our suite of digital services.”