Complaints about its mobile banking app led ING Direct Australia to develop a new version which offered improved features with good security.
Speaking at the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit in Sydney, ING Direct Australia solution architect Johnathan Sharratt told delegates that its old app had a limited set of features.
“It forced our users back to the website because they couldn’t do what they wanted to via mobile,” he said. “As a result, we had a bad rating on Apple’s App Store and anonymous comments from unhappy customers.”
A new app was released for iOS and Android devices on 25 June 2013. Once a customer is registered, they can check their balance without entering a PIN.
“Having to enter a PIN just takes too long,” Sharratt said. “The key with PIN-less transactions is focusing on low risk areas such as balance checks.”
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All high risk transactions, such as adding a biller, no longer require SMS messages to be sent. ING Direct got rid of the SMS service partly due to an increase in malware and the cost of sending messages to customers.
Transactions are kept secure through two-factor authentication and a security certificate.
“We transformed SMS into a private certificate on the customer’s phone which is installed during the registration process. That private certificate is never sent over a network and stays on the phone.”
According to Sharrat, ING Direct’s app is now one of the most popular banking apps in Australia.
“We had 180,000 downloads within five weeks of release. Of those downloads, 74,000 registered the app,” he said.
Of the people who registered the app, half of them login to their account every day.
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