OCBC Bank has called upon its customers to shift away from SMS one-time passwords (OTP) to its more secure transaction verification method, the OCBC OneToken. This is as the bank joins other financial institutions in responding to Bank Negara Malaysia’s (BNM) recent directive for them to adopt five additional security measures to fight financial scams.

In a statement, OCBC said that it will be reaching out to customers soon via electronic direct mailers (EDMs), social media, and the bank’s website to guide them through the process of activating their OCBC OneToken. To clarify, the OneToken is a digital token feature within the OCBC Malaysia mobile banking app that will generate OTPs required for the authorisation of your online banking transactions – instead of relying on third-party service providers to send it through SMS.

The bank further highlighted that the OneToken is more secure as it can only be activated on a single mobile phone at any given time, which also allows OCBC to meet another of the five additional safeguards that were proposed by BNM. Furthermore, OneToken comes with two factor authentication security, and built-in defence capabilities to detect threats on customers’ mobile phones. For added security, OCBC is imposing a 12-hour cooling-off period as well when customers have successfully activated their OneToken.

Chief executive officer of OCBC Bank, Datuk Ong Eng Bin noted that most of the bank’s customers have already made the move to switch to OCBC OneToken. However, there remains a minority that continues to utilise SMS OTPs – and it is this group that OCBC Bank hopes to persuade.

“Fraudsters are looking to exploit any mistakes by customers in order to gain access to their accounts online. A significant step every customer can take to protect themselves is to switch from receiving an OTP by SMS to OCBC OneToken instead. This blocks out one of the most common ways through which fraudsters try to trick customers into divulging their personal details and OTPs,” said Datuk Ong, adding that the bank was one of the early adopters of digital tokens when the OCBC OneToken was introduced in early 2019.

Aside from that, Datuk Ong also highlighted that the bank has designed the interactive voice response (IVR) messages for its contact centres to always prioritise scam reports. Specifically, OCBC’s IVR system will always begin the conversation by offering customers the choice to report a scam, before presenting them with other banking services and options.

At the end of last month, BNM had instructed bank institutions to adopt five additional security measures in a bid to better combat financial scams. These steps include migrating away from SMS OTPs to safer verification methods, tightening fraud detection rules and triggers when blocking suspected scam transactions, as well as observing a cooling-off period for the first-time enrolment of online banking services. Aside from OCBC, several banks – including Maybank, CIMB, and Public Bank – have also released statements to pledge their support for this effort.

(Sources: OCBC, The Star, Bernama)

• TAGS:
• Bank Negara Malaysia
• BNM
• Dato’ Ong Eng Bin
• Financial Scams
• OCBC
• OCBC Bank
• OCBC OneToken
• Online Scams
• Scams
• SMS TAC