About a year after migrating all its customers to the safer and more secure OCBC OneToken for authorising online banking transactions, OCBC Malaysia is closing the loop by doing the same for all online credit and debit card transactions.

With this, its customers will no longer receive SMS OTP (one-time passwords) from the Bank to verify online credit and debit card transactions. Accordingly, any such SMS purporting to be from the Bank should be ignored as OTP can only be generated via OCBC OneToken.

(OCBC Malaysia comprises OCBC Bank (Malaysia) Berhad (OCBC Bank) and its Islamic banking subsidiary OCBC Al-Amin Bank Berhad).

According to OCBC Bank Managing Director and Head of Consumer Financial Services Ms Anne Leh, the move to completely discontinue the use of SMS OTP to authorise transactions is to ensure customers are more comprehensively protected against banking-related scam attempts.

“With this, we hope our customers will feel a greater sense of security when using their credit and debit cards online, especially given the rise in online scams by fraudsters purporting to be from banks.

“To ensure a smooth online card transaction experience, we urge all our customers who have yet to register for OCBC Online Banking to do so immediately and then to activate their OCBC OneToken. Online scams cannot be ignored or taken lightly and we look forward to continuing our duty of care to our customers,” she said.

The Bank began the call in 2022 for its customers to make it more difficult for fraudsters to trick them by encouraging them to switch from SMS OTP to the more secure OCBC OneToken. Through its introduction of OCBC OneToken in 2019, the Bank became one of the early adopters of digital tokens.

OCBC OneToken is a digital token available in the OCBC Malaysia Mobile Banking app that allows customers to securely generate an OTP to authorise their online transactions. For added security, OCBC OneToken can only be activated on a single mobile phone at any given time. In addition to providing two factor authentication (2FA) security, OCBC OneToken has built-in defence capabilities to detect threats on customers’ mobile phones.

Upon successful OCBC OneToken activation, customers will receive SMS and email alert notifications. As an additional safeguard, following the setting up of OCBC OneToken, OCBC Bank’s customers can only access OCBC Online Banking after a 12-hour cooling-off period.

For more information on authorising online card transactions using OCBC OneToken, customers can visit the OCBC Bank website at www.ocbc.com.my and then navigate to Banking for individuals > Personal Banking (Scroll down to “Useful links”) > Help and Support > Cards > Safe & Security > 3D Secure.

Alternatively, customers can also call the following numbers for assistance: Personal Banking +603 8317 5000, Premier Banking +603 8315 4288, OCBC Al-Amin Personal Banking +603 8314 9310.