Will Wells Fargo’s newly launched Commercial Electronic Office (CEO) Mobile Token encourage its traditionally paper-focused customers to crossover to mobile?
That’s what the San Francisco-based bank is expecting, at least.
“With the CEO Mobile Token more and more customers are encouraged to use their mobiles for banking,” Secil Watson, head of Digital Solutions for Business at Wells Fargo, told Bank Innovation. “The token was their idea, so we are hoping it increases customer adoption to the mobile app.”
The CEO Token was launched yesterday for its business banking customers. The app will allow treasury management customers to provide a secondary authentication for certain services and transactions.
High risk services and transactions such as wire transfers, expense management, fraud management etc, requires a secondary authentication, in addition to the typical customer user name, company ID and user password. That secondary authentication is the code that’s provided on the token.
Prior to the mobile token, a customer needed to carry a physical device that had an ever-changing number in order to provide the secondary authentication code. A typical physical token would look something like a calculator, but there are other variations.
“Carrying these physical tokens was a real pain point for our customers,” Watson said. “It’s very safe, and more convenient than the physical token.”
The token uses RSA SecurID technology. Further, Watson explained that the enrollment is a multi-step process that uses QR code reading to establish the users’ credentials as well as to ensure that the device on which the app is downloaded matches the person that it’s supposed to.
Once downloaded and approved, the user sees the token as a link on their user page in the CEO app. The code is provided once the link is accessed. The number is ever changing, Watson explained.
The token code can be used on to access the CEO portal on the mobile app as well as on desktops.
The token is available on both iPhone and Android. Customers with an iPhone, running a minimum of iOS 9.0, or 5.0 or higher on an Android, can download it from Apple’s App Store or Google Play Store. The app and token are free to download.