The CEO of Russia's Sberbank has revealed plans to limit card usage in future years in favour of biometric authentication methods including voice.Speaking to Izvestia newspaper, Herman Gref said that its voice recognition and image recognition tool had an accuracy rate of 99.9 percent, and that they were “almost ready” for deployment, reported Russia Today.Sberbank said that the voice recognition service will be offered to all the clients throughout Russia, and limited testing is already underway in Moscow.At the same time, the bank stressed the technology can indentify if a person is calling under duress or when fraudsters steal customer information from the elderly.Meanwhile, Gref said Sberbank is also actively buying ATMs with biometrics that will also cut the dependence on cards as a method of identification.”After we launch our '18+' platform, which is scheduled for 2018, the frequency of use of the card as a payment instrument will decline sharply. Banking will change dramatically,” he said.
Russia’s biggest bank planning biometric deployments
