FinTech: Union Bank’s EON product lets customers log in to their Bank Account with a selfie

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Daon’s IdentityX platform enables Philippine’s based Union Bank’s EON customers to log in with a “selfie”.

Union Bank’s digital based account EON uses fingerprint and face authentication, with plans to enable additional biometrics, e.g. voice recognition, in due course. EON’s original focus was on online shopping, but over the years the functionality has expanded. New EON is built around a customer’s broader “digital life” and is now “a community”.

Paolo Baltao, Senior VP/Head of Digital Transformation at Union Bank says the partnership was chosen following “extensive research”.

“EON is about harnessing technology to make banking delightful,” Baltao says. “With Daon’s IdentityX platform, EON introduced the first ever selfie banking in the Philippines, EON and technology go hand in hand to provide an experience that simply feels at home – even enjoyable – to the Digital MEs.”

Earlier this year, Daon helped BNP Paribas Wealth Management to launch a new biometric authentication product, myBioPass. The bank’s customers can log into their accounts with a “selfie” and authorise transactions by fingerprint and voice recognition. The bank says it is the first in Europe to put all three biometric features together.

Last year, Nequi, a financial mobile banking service from Bancolombia, has become the first in Colombia to deploy mobile biometrics for authentication – with tech provided by Daon.

IdentityX is also used by a new mobile bank in Brazil called Neon.

Its all hotting up in online Banking, in the UK we have Starling Bank who have raised $70m, Starling CEO Anne Boden is the former Chief operating officer of AIB) Monzo who have raised ¢45m, Tandem who have raised $77.8m and Atom who have raised a huge $268.4m. It will be interesting to see how it pans out, if the big institutional banks will let these challengers grow further or just take them out while they are still relatively small.

All too often in FinTech companies growth is also heavily determined by regulation, if innovation can’t keep up with regulation, then the bubble of challenger banks most definitely could go pop. I don’t think it will, but there is a lot of work to be done to ensure it doesn’t.

Also an interesting observation for those of us with an interest in the space (with the popcorn ready) will be whether the eventual winners will be those who have raised the most or those who have the best product, which includes cutting edge new tech such as biometrics.

For those of you with an interest in biometrics, look out for an announcement in Irish Tech News tomorrow for news about something big happening that includes biometrics. The news will also an AI angle and lets put it this way, some startups with a VERY high valuation may well be made obsolete overnight.

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