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MUMBAI: The country’s largest lender State Bank of India (SBI) will soon be introducing 'multi-modal’ biometric authentication for its mobile applications. This means that one of the two factors of authentication would be by using either fingerprint or face recognition or by using voice recognition software on the bank’s servers.

The bank is planning to use biometrics for various mobile banking products including the mobile wallet and Unified Payment Interface ( UPI ) transactions. The bank is in the process of finalising a service provider and has called for applications from technology providers.

All customers having finger print embedded smart phone will in future be able to authenticate transactions using this feature. However, in order to use the finger print authentication feature, the customer would have to register their finger print at the server through the bank’s existing mobile banking application.

Among public sector banks, SBI has been the most successful in migrating customers to alternate channels. Only 18 per cent of transactions now take place in the branches as against 23 per cent last year.

Speaking to ToI, Mrutyunjay Mahapatra, dmd and chief digital officer SBI said that the “Mobile banking and internet banking will get subsumed into SBI’s banking app YONO and we will see the difference between internet and mobile banking using feature phones is expected to shrink,”

Although SBI’s mobile banking transactions are at 2.8 per cent of total transactions, up from 2 per cent in end-June, this does not give a complete picture. At present many customers access internet banking using the mobile browser and these transactions does not get reflected in mobile banking.

SBI is positioning its mobile banking app Yono as a financial superstore. The app has seen 83 lakh downloads and over ten lakh new accounts have been opened using the app. According to the bank the bank is seeing more than 2.5 lakh customer login into the app every day.

Among alternate channels the biggest growth has been in point of sale terminals which accounted for 16% of bank transactions as compared to 13% a year ago.

