Voice-Activated Banking Then, Now And Soon PYMNTS.com

It's been a little over a year since our Digital Banking Tracker heralded the "Dawn of Banking Voice Technology." Santander U.K. started the trend by launching a voice assistant within SmartBank, its mobile banking app for students, before rolling it out to the general public. In the early days, adopters of the new technology mostly used it to check card spend at the end of the week or month. By winter, customers were able to move beyond simply asking questions and begin conducting actual transactions using their voice -- although they still had to log in to the app using a password. Meanwhile, it's been exactly a year since Barclays announced news that it was doing away with passwords and replacing them with voice recognition technology for identity verification.