Moxtra will help OCBC Bank Malaysia deploy and test its new Secure Chat Banking mobile app. Recently approved by Bank Negara – the country’s central bank – the pilot will take place in a regulatory sandbox environment with real customers and actual financial transactions. The bank hopes a successful test, which is expected to last for one year, will enable it to provide its premier customers with the first banking app of its kind in the country.
The idea of the new banking app came as a response to a rise in phone-based phishing fraud incidents, in which fraudsters were impersonating bank officials to trick customers into giving them personal information. OCBC Bank Malaysia head of consumer financial service Lim Wyson explained that the result has been to make bank customers very skeptical about banking by phone. “This has made it difficult for banks to carry out even simple, day-to-day, call-back verifications for confirmation of transactions,” he said.
The new app will remove the need for call-back verifications by enabling customers to securely give their financial transaction instructions to their relationship manager. Lim Wyson suggested this will also help make consumers less vulnerable to fraud, as well. “This will improve people’s experience of our services without compromising security,” he said. “It will also ultimately safeguard them from falling victim to phone spoofing and scamming activities.”
Moxtra provides financial services companies with an omni-channel client engagement platform that supports collaboration between clients and relationship managers. The technology features secure messaging, e-signatures, voice layered over content and supports real-time meetings. The service is platform-agnostic, mobile-friendly, and can be white-labeled and integrated into existing workflows.
OCBC Bank has been making major strides in modernizing its banking services of late. Last month, the bank became the first bank in Singapore to offer voice-powered, cashless payments. “This latest service marks a major milestone in banking as it brings us one huge leap closer to making natural language voice-activated banking and payments a reality,” Aditya Gupta, OCBC Bank Head of E-Business Singapore, said in a statement. “This is just a start – we will continue to embed ourselves in our customer’s everyday lives using voice-powered AI tools which they will be able to use for more banking transactions such as bill payments, money management, and common servicing requests in the future,” Gupta said.
Moxtra demonstrated its Engagement Platform at FinovateFall 2017. The company, which was founded in 2012 and is headquartered in Cupertino, California, has more than five million registered users of its solutions. Moxtra has raised $20 million in funding and includes KDDI and Cisco among its investors. Subrah Iyar is CEO.
This agreement comes just over a year after FreeAgent began working with RBS. The two formed a distribution partnership last January in which RBS offered FreeAgent’s accounting software services to its small business clients. The deal will help both parties leverage new opportunities to offer a more integrated banking and accounting experience for small businesses since, as Molyneux said, “the lines between banking, accounting and tax are becoming increasingly blurred.”