Banking with your personal assistant will be the future, whether you like it or not

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It appears that asking your phone assistant for your bank account will soon be a reality.

Samsung recently partnered with three of South Korea’s largest banks to make voice command banking a reality for South Korean users.

Bixby which is shipped with the Samsung Galaxy S8 can make financial transactions by voice command via Samsung Pay and Samsung Pass, Samsung’s answer to Touch ID.

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It’s a concept that’s similar to the partnership Amazon made with Virginia-based Capital One where Capital One customers could be able to check their account balances, recent transactions, and even pay bills just by speaking to Alexa.

The prevalence of personal and home assistants mean that banks can find a cheaper and better option by piggy-backing on Alexa, Siri or Bixby, since the technology to support voice-activated banking is already built into smartphones.

“It is in the bank’s interests to push the service as it helps cut back on manpower and costs,” Chia Tek Yew, head of Financial Services Advisory at KPMG Singapore, told Mashable.

“And at home, it will be a convenient channel of choice given the prevalence of home assistants Amazon Echo, Google Home and Apple HomePod,” Chia added. “[People] will be drawn to shop and transact via voice.”

A customer sets the Touch ID of his new iPhone 7 at an Apple Store in Madrid, Spain.

Image: Getty Images

Regulators are also unlikely to push back regarding voice-activated banking, said Michael Yeo, a Singapore-based research manager at marketing research firm IDC.

“We will continue to witness developments which should push the edge on what can be done with voice,” Yeo told Mashable. “We have already seen examples in China and Singapore where voice commands can issue payments.”

Voice-activated banking hasn’t been explicitly barred, said Chia, adding that in some countries, banks have already used voice assistants to perform banking transactions. Spain-based Santander, for one, is offering voice command banking in their mobile app.

Your face or your thumbprint will be part of this

If recent developments are of any clue, biometric scanning could be a major part of voice-activated banking.

Since Apple’s Touch ID made fingerprint scanning a must-have with smartphones, biometric authentication has been a mainstay. It’s likely that iris scanning will take off, with the iPhone 8 rumoured to have a front-facing 3D camera system that could unlock the phone based on detailed iris or facial recognition, similar to the S8’s iris scanner.

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Bixby’s integration with South Korean banks could mean that South Korean users could say good-bye to their clunky banking dongles, for one.

That’s definitely more secure than Amazon’s integration with Capital One, where users are only asked to add a PIN number.

“Iris scanners and fingerprint recognition technology are generally beyond many existing methods, such as passwords, which are used by the majority of banks out there,” Yeo said.

Antony Eldridge, a financial services and fintech leader at PwC Singapore, said that iris and fingerprint scanners are more secure as they are “much more difficult to fake.”

“These appear more acceptable to both [the] public and authorities,” Eldridge said.

Still, most banking security standards written by regulatory bodies like the European Banking Authority and the FFIEC have required multi-factor authentication for bank transactions.

Multi-factor authentication depends on more than one of three things what you are, like your fingerprint or iris pattern; what you have, like a physical token, an ATM card or your phone; and what you know, like a password.

So while banks could integrate biometrics into a two-factor authentication framework, the whole aspect of having another method like your banking dongle or password isn’t likely to change, said Yeo.

“[The] whole essence of two-factor authentication [is that it] requires confirmation by other means,” he added.

But if your identity is tied to your phone like in Samsung Pass, where each device can only be programmed to recognise one set of irises it could still be, in the eyes of regulators, considered two-factor identification, said Chia.

While the industry has made moves to integrate banking with personal and home assistants, updates are coming slowly. Amazon’s partnership with Capital One came in March 2016, and there has yet to be anything like it since.

Whether voice-activated banking will take off would depend on how ubiquitous personal assistants are. It’s likely to remain an option, but just that, as some will never use this feature at all, Yeo said.

“Many still find it awkward to use Siri or Google Assistant on their smartphones,” Yeo said.

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Read more: http://mashable.com/2017/06/10/personal-assistant-banking-now/

Third parties have always been the key to Amazons smart home domination plans

For Amazon, hardware has always been a means to an end. From the Kindle e-reader to the Fire tablets to its TV offerings, the company has always treated the space as something of a loss leader even with its most popular offerings. Amazon has found success in pricing devices much closer to cost than the competition something a company can only really get away with if it plans to make up for things somewhere down the road, like, say if youre in the content selling business.

The Echo line is no different, of course. The goal of the hardware hub is simple: to seed living rooms with its smart assistant and become an essential part of the connected home. The desktop-mounted devices were a first step toward getting Alexa into the world, and while the company has made it clear it isnt done with the Echo line (as evidenced by the recent launch of the Look), its ready to let other companies do the heavy lifting.

The actual success of the Echo line took most (likely Amazon included) by surprise. The company never likes to give out exact numbers when it comes to hardware, but by all accounts, the products have been a massive success. Over the holidays, it noted that it had sold 9x as many Echo devices as it had the previous year, only saying that the number was in the millions.

But the next phase in Amazons master plan has been rolling out for the past year-and-a-half, as the company has not only embraced third-party hardware makers its actively engaged them. Last week, Amazon joined component company Conexant to announce the release of the AudioSmart Development Kit for Alexa Voice Service a second devkit aimed at streamlining the process of bringing Alexa voice functionality to their devices.

The day prior, smart appliance maker Ecobee announced that the Amazons smart home assistant would be a part of its products in a big way, moving forward. It would start with a new version of the companys connected thermostat built using an earlier version of the Conexant dev kit. Later in the year, it will be bringing the functionality to connected light switches, with the semi-ominous goal of weaving the power of voice into the walls of entire households.

The thermostat marked something of a departure from many Alexa-enabled devices before it, in that it wasnt simply the addition of an Alexa skill to an existing product. Nor was it a desk-mounted device designed to compete directly with the Echo line. Only a few of its voice-enabled functions actually pertain to thermostat features. The other 12,000 or so essentially make the product an Echo surrogate, silently waiting for its wake word.

Its proof of concept for the company that Alexa is just as good outside the Echo. More to the point, its the tip of a growing trend in which third-party manufacturers help spread the Alexa gospel. Its no coincidence, of course, that Ecobee was a $35 million recipient of Amazons Alexa Fund, a VC campaign that believe[s] experiences designed around the human voice will fundamentally improve the way people use technology. And, you know, promoting the companys own titular assistant a bit along the way doesnt hurt, either, right?

Amazon happily tosses out a number from RBC that puts Alexa on 128 million devices by the end of 2020 (with roughly half that number sold that year). It seems like a stretch at the current rate, but adoption certainly does appearto be snowballing a particularly impressive feat given that the fact that unlike Siri and Google Assistant, the product didnt have smartphones as a jumping off point.

Though, in recent months, the assistants success has been large enough in North America that a handful of smartphone markers have eschewed Googles offering in favor of Amazon, which is no doubt something of a sweet revenge for a company that failed so publicly in its own attempt to launch a smart home offering.

But while Echoes will likely continue to see for some time, thanks in part to regular refreshes of the line, Amazon is working on its own planned obsolescence. The more the functionality is baked into third-party products, the less need users will have for their own standalone Echo devices. And thats perfectly fine for Amazon.

The Echo line has done its job better than Amazon could have imagined, putting the company well ahead of Apple and Google with regards to penetrating the smart home. For millions of users, the Echo will be their first dip in the waters of the connected home. They purchased an Echo because of the neat tricks they say on TV or the recommendation of a friend. The fact that it can control the high tech smart lights they had their eye on is just a bonus.

Amazon has done the hard work of getting Alexa out into the world. The next couple of years, the burden of follow through will be on the many hardware partners looking to the cash in on Alexas success. And on Apple and Google, who have a lot of catching up to do.

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/06/amazon-echo-world-domination/