OCBC Sees Positive Customer Feedback from NEC Facial Recognition Solution

OCBC Bank’s Holland Village branch in Singapore has been reaping the benefits of an automated system to identify Premier Banking customers, using technology from NEC.

The system uses facial recognition to passively identify the bank’s high rollers as they approach the branch’s lounge, with no need for them to stop and look directly at the camera. With customers automatically identified, bank staff can greet them by name and offer their preferred drinks or magazines, allowing for a higher quality of customer service.

The system is based on NEC’s NeoFace platform. While NeoFace has seen a number of high-profile government applications, generally in a security context, NEC has also been promoting the solution’s retail applications in recent years, with the OCBC Holland Village deployment illustrating the kind of high-level customer service it can facilitate.

OCBC, meanwhile, has been a relatively enthusiastic adopter of innovative biometric solutions in the financial services sector, having announced plans for a voice authentication system in the summer of 2016, and more recently having enabled customers to log in to its mobile app using Face ID, the highly secure facial recognition system of the iPhone X. In a statement, OCBC SVP Pranav Seth said that since the facial recognition system was deployed in December, the bank has “received positive feedback from customers who were impressed by the personalized hospitality enabled by fast and accurate identification.” Seth added that the bank will next “consider the extension of the capability beyond customer service.”

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February 14, 2018 – by Alex Perala