Alexa, I can trust you with my checkbook, right?
Big banks and financial companies think customers can. Some are offering banking through virtual assistants—Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Google’s Assistant. Customers will be able to check balances, pay bills, and soon, send money just with their voices.
Naturally, the potential to do such sensitive tasks through a smart speaker raises security concerns. Virtual assistants are still relatively new technologies. Not only do they sometimes glitch (see Alexa Tells All). They are potentially susceptible to hacking by cyber criminals.
Regional giant U.S. Bank is the first to use all three services. The company did a soft launch of its Siri and Assistant services in early March and in June started marketing the option to customers. Other financial companies such as Capital One and American Express both have Alexa options. Customers can check their balances and pay bills by speaking.
“We want to be there for our customers in any possible way that we can,” says Gareth Gaston, an executive vice president at U.S. Bank.
For now, U.S. Bank is keeping the features available through bank-by-voice fairly restrictive. Customers can check bank balances, pay U.S. Bank credit cards and mortgages, ask Alexa or Google for bill due dates, and other basic functions. Money cannot be transferred from a U.S. Bank account using voice yet. But the bank is considering the option.
Asking Google, Alexa, or Siri for the weather or to tell a joke is one thing. It’s another issue when these assistants access and share sensitive personal information. The apps can’t tell who else is in the room when they announce, say, your checking account balance or the size of your last paycheck deposit. To limit access by unauthorized users, banks and virtual assistants do require a four-digit PIN number. Apple’s Siri is the most restrictive. It will only show a bank account balance on a screen. Siri also does not offer bill paying or voice commands for banking.
Google Assistant has an individual voice recognition option. That could provide one additional level of security, but it’s not implemented at U.S. Bank yet. Security experts say voice recognition is easy to foil, however.
“Users’ voices can be recorded, manipulated, and replayed to the assistants,” says security researcher Kurt Baumgartner. And that puts remote financial fraud readily into the hands of cyber-thieves everywhere. Perhaps the wise should consider carefully whether speaking openly about money matters is the best route to take.
For the protection of wisdom is like the protection of money, and the advantage of knowledge is that wisdom preserves the life of him who has it. — Ecclesiastes 7:12
