Westpac and NAB have joined the voice commerce goldrush, enabling customers to connect their Internet baking accounts to Amazon's Alexa, which has finally gotten its first outing in Australia.
The two banks have been working behind the scenes with Amazon for months to ensure that Alexa's debut in consumer homes can handle basic personal finance queries as well as order music and goods from the e-commerce giant.
Westpac customers can now access their account balance, recent spending history, and reward points status with Alexa, while NAB allows customers to drill the device about their latest deposits and payments in and out of their accounts.
A Westpac financial markets update will also be available via a flash briefing for Alexa, which allows customers to include the financial news in their daily news updates.
Travis Tyler, general manager, consumer digital at Westpac says: "While customers won’t be able to transfer funds or make payments yet, our teams constantly look at adding more features to all our technology, so watch this space…"
For NAB, the Alexa experience is the bank's first step in providing ‘authorised information’ for consumer smart devices. It follows the launch of a Google Assistant app a few months ago, which focused on publicly available information.
NAB executive general manager digital & innovation Jonathan Davey says: “We’ll continue to analyse customer use and test new experiences with customers to determine how we continue to provide new features and functionality.
“In the future, we certainly see this experience turning into one where you can pay bills, make funds transfers or even purchase items at the command of your voice.”