Millennials are all about standing out from the crowd. About being your own person, with your own individual style, right? That’s why face filters are so popular now because they help young people stand out from the sea of regular (ugh) selfies that pop up on social media all the time. But sometimes, bunnies, dogs, cats, heart arrows and rainbows just aren’t unique enough anymore because everyone is doing it now.
If you really want to stand out though, I’ve got the ultimate face filter for you. Well, technically it’s Hong Leong Bank’s face filter, but you already know that if a bank came up with it, it’s gonna be fire emoji.
Oh yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. THAT is how you stand out, ladies and gentlemen.
Wow!
But of course, Hong Leong Bank’s (HLB) goal wasn’t just to launch awesome banking related face filters. This is all part of the bank’s annual Digital Day 2018 campaign, where the theme is about helping their customers “live life uninterrupted”.
At the core of it, HLB is trying to raise awareness about their suite of digital banking innovations through the HLB Digital Day AR Challenge.
This challenge takes place from the 4th to the 31st of July 2018 and it leverages Facebook’s AR Filter functions to showcase seven different digital innovations HLB has launched and is currently working on. These are Facial Recognition, Request for Payment, AI Chatbot, Pay Mobile, Conversational AI, Scan and Pay, and, the culmination of all of them, Life365.
Most of these features have already been rolled out by HLB, with the only real exception — and the project that they’re currently working on — being Conversational AI. HLB informs me that there are plenty of challenges they will have to overcome — especially when it comes to training the machine learning model to understand our unique use of language — before something like this can be rolled out.
However, once they’ve got that down, the vision is to have this AI system respond to voice commands that will allow you to direct it to pay bills and transfer funds. That’s a pretty tall order, but HLB assured me that they’re working hard to push this out as soon as they can.
Another thing they’re working on is to allow users to authorise transfers and transactions with facial recognition. Unfortunately, HLB informs me that you can’t do this yet. In fact, if you’re on anything but the iPhone X, you also can’t log into the HLB app with facial recognition.
That said, they did tell me that they’ve rolled out fingerprint biometric login to all other Android smartphones, a feature that was previously only available on Samsung‘s smartphones. This honestly feels a little slow for a Maybank user like me, because Maybank has long allowed me to log in and access basic functions with my fingerprint scanner. Still, at least you can use your fingerprint now, right? I just hope they work on granting facial unlock access to Android phones soon, otherwise, OPPO Find X users may be left out.
But, besides these technological advancements for HLB, this Digital Day AR Challenge is also supposed to be fun and HLB has actually attached a series of prizes for those who use these filters. During the challenge period, HLB will release a new AR filter on Facebook based on one of the seven digital innovations.
All you need to do to win is snap a photo of yourself with the AR filter on and share it on your Facebook page with the hashtag #HLBDigitalDay. Make sure your post is set to “Public”.
Prizes for these include 7,000 Baskin Robbins e-vouchers and seven grand prizes in the form of an RM7,000 fixed deposit with a seven-month tenure. There will be one grand prize winner for each AR filter.
The first one is already up on HLB’s Facebook page so you can head on over for more details.
