Scotiabank’s Tangerine is reportedly exploring new facial-recognition technology

Scotiabank’s Tangerine, known as ING Direct before 2012, has already established itself as the leader when it comes to Canadian banking technological innovations, and the company is looking to cement this position by delving into facial-recognition-powered banking, according to a recent report from Bloomberg News.

Back in 2013, Tangerine was the first bank in Canada to implement fingerprint scanning via Apple’s Touch ID technology, and also recently launched voice-enabled banking, as well as the ability to snap photographs of cheques and then have them automatically deposited into customer bank accounts.

“No one is sure what the gold standard is going to be, so you have to have the ability to be trying and testing and see what works,” said Tangerine’s chief executive officer Peter Aceto, in a recent interview with Bloomberg.

“Certainly interacting with our mobile app using your face, using your voice, using your finger are things that we’re going to enhance and deploy in a much broader way.”

Tangerine was also one of the first financial institutions in Canada to launch internet banking back in 1998, as well a mobile banking platform in 2010, two dates that were significantly ahead of most of the company’s competitors.

The latest innovation from Tangerine has the company delving deeper into biometric technology, more specifically facial recognition, although the financial institution says it’s not ready to go into specifics regarding how it intends to use the technology yet.

Canadian bank RBC recently announced that it plans to implement fingerprint authentication in its mobile wallet app shortly after the announcement of Google’s Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P late last month, two devices set to launch with Nexus Imprint technology.

The Bank of Nova Scotia purchased Tangerine – then known as ING Direct – for $3.1-billion CAD back in 2012.

[source]Bloomberg[/source]