ANZ Bank will invest $1.5 billion over five years in mobile, videoconferencing and other upgrades in an effort to enhance customers’ banking experience.
“We know our customers prefer to do their day-to-day transactions in their own time either online or by using mobile devices so our task is to respond to this change by embracing the online and digital challenge and enable our customers to bank with us on their terms,” said the bank's CEO, Philip Chronican.
Also, ANZ announced it's exploring using fingerprint-recognition technology to replace traditional PIN codes. The bank commissioned a Newspoll survey of Australians and found that 79 per cent would be comfortable with the biometrics technology, the bank said.
“Before long we may use our fingerprints or even retina scans to make payments," Futurist Ross Dawson said in a statement provided by ANZ. "Australians have shown they are comfortable with biometric identification, because it combines convenience with security."
Mobile
ANZ will release a new iPhone and iPad app that can process same-day credit and debit card transactions. The bank will also launch a mobile banking app for its corporate customers where businesses can approve large payments on the go.
Today, the bank will start trialling an ANZ mobile wallet using near-field communications (NFC) technology on Android devices. The NFC trial has Chronican and 24 other ANZ employees “live testing our solution with the aim to make this available to our customers in mid-2013,” Chronican said.
Videoconferencing
ANZ plans to deploy Cisco videoconferencing to 43 remote branches, bridging regional customers with banking specialists based in Melbourne by year end.
“We’ve been piloting the use of Cisco’s videoconferencing technology in remote branches and we will be the first bank in Australia to use this technology on a major scale, providing regional customers with better access to specialist advice,” Chronican said.
ATMs, branches upgrade
ANZ is refurbishing its branches and introducing 800 new ATMs providing 24-hour access to transactions, including instant value for deposits. The cash machines also include contactless NFC readers. The upgrade will make ANZ “more readily able” in the future to introduce other technologies like contactless or cardless transactions, Chronican said.
In addition, the bank plans to introduce live chat support to ANZ.com.
Banks are facing increasing competitive pressure to make their services mobile. Commonwealth Bank chief information officer Michael Harte recently said that the future of banking lies in recreating the 'old fashioned' banking experience of personalised service using the potential of mobile devices, whole-of-life customer data and real-time transactions.
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