Your fingerprint, an iPhone 5S/6 or a Samsung Galaxy S5 will soon allow you to verify your identity with St George and its banking parent Westpac who will be amongst the first banks worldwide to offer the technology.
Biometric identification was once the province of sci-fi and secret agent movies, but now it’s set to come to the slightly more mundane world of banking.
St George announced it would arrive on the iPhone 5S in September once the new, free iOS 8 update is released, which presumably means the tech will also work with the two new iPhone 6 models and future iPads with Apple’s Touch ID technology, while ANZ is reportedly looking at launching voice print recognition tech soon.
Samsung Galaxy S5 owners are due to get the capability later this year, and while there’s no word on whether the technology will also work with the fingerprint reader-equipped Galaxy Tab S tablet, or future iPad Air 2 and iPad Mini 3 models with expected Touch ID fingerprint readers, the chances are they will also be able to take part in all the biometric action.
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| St George mobile banking with Fingerprint ID recognition – coming soon |
Reported in Fairfax press and elsewhere, the fingerprints will be secure thanks to Apple’s Touch ID technology which stores fingerprint data in a “secure enclave” within the Apple A7 processor.
Fairfax quoted St George CEO George Frazis saying “It’s difficult to respond when a disrupter has entered the market. You have to be at the forefront”, noting that St George was one of the first banks worldwide to launch Internet banking and even has a Google Glass banking app ready to go when Google makes its wearable Glass computer officially available in Australia.
The NAB is also trialling similar technology but, like ANZ, hasn’t said when its biometric initiatives will be introduced.
No doubt hackers will try to use the same “gummy bear fingerprint capturing technique” that was used by the
German Chaos Computer Club to “defeat” the iPhone 5S Touch ID system not long after it launched last year.
However given the fact most people’s phones are covered in multiple fingerprints that don’t necessarily easily lend themselves to being “gummy bear” copied, and that today’s phones can be remotely wiped, the future of banking points to a big role for biometric fingerprint identification.
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