ICICI Bank teams with Apple to launch voice-based international remittance service for NRIs

India's largest private sector bank by consolidated assets, ICICI Bank, on Thursday announced the launch of India's first voice-based international remittance service to enable non-resident Indians (NRIs) to send money to any bank in India.

With this new feature in the ICICI Bank's Money2India app, an NRI customer can instantly initiate a remittance to his/her existing payees in India with just a simple voice command to Apple's virtual voice assistant, Siri, on their iPhone/iPad.

A first-of-its-kind cross-border remittance service by a bank in the country, it improves customer convenience significantly as it replaces a five-step process, which was earlier required to initiate a remittance to India earlier.

To get the benefit of this unique offering, the customer needs to simply speak out the 'nickname' of the registered payee in the Money2India (M2I) app to whom he/she wants to send money.

For example, the customer can initiate the process by simply saying "Send USD 100 to mom with Money2India."

Based on this voice instruction, Siri will convert the voice command to text using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and populate an interface for confirmation with the details.

The customer is no longer required to enter the payee name or amount to be transferred since he/she would be using a voice command to provide instructions to Siri.

Upon confirmation of the details by the customer, Siri passes the request to the M2I app through the Siri payment API and opens the app on the device.

The customer now only needs to login into the M2I app and confirm the auto-populated details of the transaction for the money to be sent. The entire process is secured by the two-factor authentication parameter of device authentication and secure login by the customer.

Moreover, all transactions take place on the secure servers of ICICI Bank within the M2I app itself and no confidential or financial information is shared.

"At ICICI Bank, our philosophy is 'Ready For You. Ready For Tomorrow', wherein we are committed to offering innovative products and services to our customers at the fastest possible speed and with the highest level of convenience. The integration of our Money2India remittance app with Apple's Siri is an outcome of this vision," said Executive Director, ICICI Bank, Vijay Chandok.

"We are offering our NRI customers a unique combination of speed and an enriched experience of executing a transaction by just a voice command. We are the first in India and among few banks globally to enable customers to initiate a cross-border remittance with just a simple voice command. We believe, these new features will appeal to the global diaspora due to an enhanced customer experience thereby leading to a manifold increase in remittances through our platform," added Chandok.

Available 24x7 and on-all-days, this service can be used by the users of 'Money2India' mobile app using Apple iPhone or iPad with iOS version10 and above.