In my opinion, this is a great move towards making mobile banking more usable. Compared to carrying around a hard token or having a 20 random character password

In my opinion, this is a great move towards making mobile banking more usable. Compared to carrying around a hard token or having a 20 random character password, biometrics offer good user experience without compromising the security too much. There are plenty intelligent ways of performing liveliness detection, the most obvious being a challenge-response scenario. That being said, no individual biometric is good enough to provide a good and consistent experience on it's own. Every one has situations and environments it fails in (noisy room, dark environment, etc.). That's why I believe only a combination of different modalities (facial, voice, etc.), can provide a robust and consistent solution. For full disclosure - I'm the CTO of AimBrain and we're hiring: https://aimbrain.com/joinus https://aimbrain.com/joinus