For City Union Bank (CUB) customers, their voice can now be their new password. The Kumbakonam-headquartered bank on Wednesday launched the country's first voice biometric authentication for logging into its mobile banking app.

The voice biometric service was developed by Chennai-based deeptech start-up, Kaizen Secure Voiz Pvt Ltd, under the guidance of the 5G use case lab of the Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technology (IDRBT), an RBI established institution focussed on research in banking technologies.

Launching the product, N Kamakodi, MD & CEO, City Union Bank, said, the bank has been at the forefront of many technology innovations and implementation, including the first robot (Lakshmi) in the banking industry, multilingual chatbots in the mobile banking app, the country's first wearable debit card in the form of a wrist watch and key chains, among others.

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He added that the voice biometric service will initially be restricted to login and not authentication of transactions.

Customers have to register their voice once, which will be validated on various parameters. CUB said the service will prevent fraud based on PIN / OTP and the technology is fool-proof against recorded or mimicked voices