TPPA set to boost Citibank's presence in Malaysia

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) will boost Citibank Bhd's (Citi Malaysia) presence in Malaysia once the mega trade pact is implemented.

Its CEO Lee Lung Nien, said the TPPA would benefit Citi Malaysia as it was a local arm of US multinational investment banking and financial services corporation, Citigroup Inc.

"However, the US needs to sort it out first. It needs to get approved first by their Congress," he told reporters after the launch of the bank's voice biometrics authentication here today.

The TPPA, a free-trade agreement that will liberalise trade and investment among 12 Pacific Rim countries, including Malaysia and the US, is currently under a two-year ratification process.

Meanwhile, Consumer Banking Manager, Elaine Fan, said Citi Malaysia aimed for 100 percent adoption of its voice biometrics authentication by its consumer banking clients in the next 12 months.

To-date, the bank has some one million consumer banking clients in Malaysia, which contributed about 55 per cent to the bank's revenue, she said.

She said the bank expected at least 1,000 consumer business clients per day to enrol for the newly-launched voice biometrics authentication.

"It is a continuous target to enrol at lease 1,000 per day and hopefully we can get that to increase," she told reporters after the launch.

Citibank is the first financial services firm to deploy voice biometrics authentication in Malaysia and Asia-Pacific.

The voice biometrics authentication identifies customers through their voice print, which like a fingerprint, is unique to each person.

Citi Malaysia clients can opt to enrol by recording their voices which the bank will use to generate and store the voice prints for matching subsequent calls to Citibank.

Customers who call the bank's contact centres will have their identities automatically verified within 15 seconds or less as they explain their reasons for calling as opposed to an average time of around 45 seconds currently spent verifying their details.

Fan said voice biometrics authentication has already been implemented in Taiwan, Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore in the last 12 months.

The Citi Group has 15 million consumer banking customers in the region and expects to have at least one million customers actively using voice biometrics authentication in the next 12 months.