Australia-based St George Bank is set to roll out a new smartwatch banking application as part of its strategy to offer improved banking services to customers leveraging new wearable technology.
Additionally, the lender is reportedly working on a prototype of a banking app for Google Glass, which is expected to be launched after the smartwatch app is made available for its customers, reported afr.com.
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St George chief information officer Dhiren Kulkarni was quoted by the publication as saying that it is the first bank in Australia to launch a mobile banking application for smartwatches, with it initially being launched for Sony’s SmartWatch 2, ahead of other versions for Samsung and other models.
According the bank, customers can check their account balance and locate nearest ATM and branch direction services using the smartwatch app; however, they will not be able to carry out transactional services.
"In my opinion in order to do financial transactions it will be at least a year or two years away, when you have good enough biometric security . . . We know it could actually be done already, but the security is not there yet," Kulkarni told the publication.
In future, the bank is planning to incorporate alerts which can be sent to the watch when a big deposit or withdrawal is carried out.
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By GlobalDataFurthermore, the app would also be able to send a prompt that will alert customers at international airports to tell the bank where they are travelling, which would prevent accounts being disabled due to suspect payments from other countries.
