Individuals with an OCBC credit card and a lack of impulse control have become the bank’s latest market in their newly minted offering. Through a collaboration with Silicon Valley company Ondot, OCBC Bank is allowing its customers the ability to control their payment cards and preferences through a mobile app.

Ondot is an API-based platform that allows users to exert control over their cards via a mobile app. According to the company, the architecture has been utilised by 3,500 financial institutions across the globe. The company’s services are more consumer-based, and can be done in real-time over their mobile phones.

Ondot expanded its mobile card services into Asia just earlier this year.

Some Mobile Functions Available to OCBC Bank Customers

The no-frills mobile layout enables cardholders to determine when, where and how their cards are used by setting their preferences in five sub-headers:

• Location, or where their cards can be used
• Merchant type, where users enable or disable specific merchants or categories.
• Transaction type, which allows users to define the types of transactions that are allowed, and encompasses the e-commerce or mail order purchases as well
• Spending limits, which for most banks is not available via mobile
• On/Off, which allows users to temporarily enable or disable cards that may be misplaced or to prevent misuse

According to an OCBC representative, the services are particularly geared towards reducing card fraud, by allowing users to limit locations and transactions to their actual usage.

Beyond just limiting transactions, the new expansion also allows cardholders to set alerts as well for any card transactions that set of specific triggers. The OCBC representative continues to say that the notifications are actionable before the transaction is completed—a safeguard familiar to those who use CRIS or OTP codes.

However, we definitely see the new mobile app as a tool for those who may want to set real limits to their monthly budgets, or even cardholders that allow their plastic to be used by their spouses or children.

The collaboration was driven by OCBC’s Open Vault, the bank’s fintech unit that aims to restructure through collaborations with more agile fintech firms. Earlier this year, the bank teamed up with Fundaztic, a peer-to-peer funding platform for SME funding.

Featured image via OCBC