NAB to customers: you're the voice on security

National Australia Bank will begin using voice recognition technology to identify its phone customers in the latest move towards the use of biometric security among the big banks. The company said that the technology, which identifies a person by their speech, will cut waiting times for users and boost security. NAB said up to 40 per cent of customers forget their phone banking passwords. It comes a month after ANZ announced it was looking into retina and fingerprint scanning as part of a $1.5 billion investment to upgrade customer services. In early October, ANZ floated the idea of retina-scanning automatic teller machines and said it was considering using electronic fingerprints as part of an effort to beat rival banks in the realm of technology. NAB's executive general manager of enterprise transformation, Adam Bennett, said speech recognition would save customers "a combined 15 million minutes a year".