From Business Tech.

One of the world’s largest banks, HSBC is now allowing customers to open accounts by taking a photo of themselves with their mobile phone.

The bank enables clients to log into their accounts using facial recognition technology. The “selfie” will be matched with a photo from a passport or driving license, the bank said in a statement earlier this month.

“We also expect the convenience and speed of a selfie to become the verification method of choice for our customers who no longer need to visit a branch to complete the process,” the bank said.

BusinessTech asked South Africa’s major banks how far away this technology is from being adopted locally.

Capitec’s Charl Nel said: “Capitec Bank already takes photos of our clients with their fingerprints. The natural next step in development is to activate photo recognition. We cannot comment on ‘selfie’ banking yet, but the idea does not seem a stretch, once photo recognition is part of our everyday operations.”

Nedbank said it has had demontrations of this technology (facial recognition) but noted that “it is not on our immediate roadmap.”

“The demos to date have shown us how the bank could use facial recognition for a customer experience lift, queue management, emotion detection, segmentation reporting and direct marketing in our branch network based on age analysis.

“We are familiar with the capabilities, but do not have a feasible business case around it as yet. The technology is also not yet pervasive, there are no industry standards, and it has not been proven to be cost effective. Therefore, it is not off the radar for the bank, but it currently does not rank up there with some of the other security, identification and verification initiatives we currently have in play,” Nedbank said.

Standard Bank said, “We are working on a few exciting things but not at the point yet where we can discuss.”

Read more at Business Tech.