OCBC Bank has integrated its business mobile banking app with Apple’s Siri, allowing users to make fund transfers and account balance enquiries by using the voice recognition technology.

These features will be available from 9 October 2017 to SME customers using iPhones running on Apple’s iOS 11 mobile operating system. Over 120,000 Singapore-registered users of OCBC Bank’s internet business banking portal stand to benefit from the new service.

This use of voice recognition technology will allow SME owners to perform banking transactions while on the move. They will only have to tell Siri whom to send the payment to and how much they want to send, or ask Siri to check their account balance. Validation will be done via fingerprint authentication and One Time Passwords (OTP) sent via SMS.

Linus Goh, head of global commercial banking at OCBC Bank, said: “We are pleased to be leading the charge in Asia in introducing voice banking to our business customers. SME business owners are time-starved and constantly on the go, and we believe these innovative solutions based on voice recognition technology will vastly improve the way in which our customers manage their everyday business banking needs.”

Praveen Raina, senior vice president of group operations and technology at OCBC Bank, added: “The e-payments push is not just about peer-to-peer payments, but encompasses business-to-business payments too. We have already made online and mobile banking easy for SMEs in order to encourage them to go cashless. Voice recognition technology is integral to this, and it is easy to envision the use of Siri to make e-payments, or to check account balances, becoming second nature to business owners.”

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