Commonwealth Bank has announced NameCheck, a way to confirm your money is going where it should be.
When you transfer money in Australia, banks don’t actually check you’ve got the right account name/number or that the recipient isn’t a scammer – it’s something I personally only recently found out.
At the bottom of the transfer screen on my bank’s app, some small font reads: “[Bank] doesn’t check the details you enter including that the BSB and account number belong to the account name. If you enter the wrong BSB or account number, it may not be possible to recover your money from the unintended recipient”.
I did a little digging and turns out that’s not something offered by banks.
Until now, with the yellow bank announcing a brand new feature.
“When they transfer money online many people assume the intended recipient’s account name is checked as well as the BSB and account number, but in most cases this is not possible,” CBA group executive for retail banking Angus Sullivan said.
The feature is called ‘NameCheck’ and the tech exists to give customers an indication of whether the name and account details they entered look right. Launching in late March, Commonwealth Bank said the technology can help reduce false billing scams – known as business email compromise, or BEC – as well as mistaken payments.
“We have been able to apply unique technology and advanced algorithms to our data on recipient account names which gives customers making first time payments a view of the likelihood that the name and account details match,” Sullivan added.
The tech also prompts you on steps you can take to help ensure you’re sending money to the correct account.
NameCheck will be available across the Commonwealth Bank’s CommBank app, NetBank and CommBiz.
The bank has also launched in-app caller verification technology through a feature called CallerCheck. CallerCheck will see staff trigger a notification to the customer’s CommBank app verifying the call is from the bank and allowing the customer to log in and verify their identity in-app.
This way you don’t provide personal info over the phone.