Conversational Banking, I like it..

'Hey Siri, pay John $20 for dinner': Westpac launches voice payments

By Clancy Yeates, SMH

It wasn't that long ago that moving money with the touch of a mobile phone button was considered cutting-edge. From this week, consumers will be able to pay someone simply by talking to their smart phone's "digital assistant" and taking a scan of their face.

After rapid growth in the use of smart phones for banking, Westpac is betting that the next step for many customers will be what it calls "conversational banking" - managing their finances by speaking to a smart phone or similar device.

Westpac's chief executive of consumer banking, George Frazis, says "conversational banking" is the future.

In a move targeted at millennials in particular, the bank will allow customers to check their account balance and move money to other people's accounts using Apple iPhone's digital assistant, Siri.

The change will remove the need to have any physical contact with a phone - such as providing a fingerprint - to make a transaction.

It is the latest sign of banks grappling with the rise of smart phone banking, with ANZ Bank this week saying it would allow customers to access ATMs with a phone, rather than a card. It already lets customers tap their phone on credit card terminals to make purchases via Apple Pay. ING allows customers to check their balance by talking to their phone but Westpac is the first in the local industry to offer voice-activated transactions.

Westpac's chief executive of consumer banking, George Frazis, said the move was a response to the surge in smart phone banking. Four-fifths of the bank's digital transactions now took place through mobiles, he said, predicting "conversational banking" would also take off.

"The future of banking is conversational banking," Mr Frazis said. “If you look at smart phone users, about half of them now are using voice assistants, so you can see that this trend is just going to increase."

Westpac says its change will allow customers with a sufficiently advanced iPhone to move money by saying a command such as "Hey Siri, pay John Citizen $20 for dinner”.

The phone's "assistant" will then confirm the payment and ask the customer to prove their identity by allowing the phone to take a finger print or a face scan before the cash is transferred.

The bank says moving money in this way is more secure than entering a password on a phone because the newer methods use "biometric" information to verify a customer's identity. To use this feature, the iPhone will need to be running Apple's operating system iOS11 or a more recent version.

Under the change, customers will initially only be able to check account balances and move money to other people's accounts via Siri. But Mr Frazis said there was clear potential to expand the service so it could be used to pay other bills in future or give customers simple advice.

“The opportunities for this down the track are quite immense,” he said.

The bank's market research has found almost half of Australians use a voice assistant on their smart phone, and of this group, the biggest users of voice assistants were those aged between 25 and 34.