Earlier today, one of the largest US banks Chase, rolled out an update for its Chase Mobile Android app for banking on the go. Among other things, the said app now supports numerous built-in fingerprint readers as an option for logging into it. So, if you happen to be a Chase client with a smartphone featuring a fingerprint reader and you aren’t a fan of memorizing long usernames and even longer passwords, there’s a good chance you won’t have to do that anymore. The only catch is that you have to at least be running Android 6.0 Marshmallow on your device in order to take advantage of this latest Chase Mobile feature.
For better or worse, Chase still isn’t allowing you anything else other than logging into your account without a password, though. That means that any and all transactions and other actions you may want to conduct using the institution’s mobile banking app will still require traditional password authentication. Naturally, the developers explained this is for users’ own protection so even if someone manages to fool your device’s fingerprint reader, they probably won’t be able to do much more other than to check the status of your accounts.
If the comments on the apps’ Google Play Store page are representative of average users’ opinion on Chase Mobile, it seems like fingerprint support was one of the most sought-after features together with per-transaction notifications which still haven’t been included in this piece of mobile banking software. As of the latest update, the app is just over 15 MB in size and requires Android 4.0.3 or newer versions of the mobile OS. The update is apparently relatively stable and other than a couple of issues with identification codes not being sent after uninstallation, no major bugs have been reported by the user base. At the moment of writing this, the latest Chase Mobile update which upgrades the app to version 3.27 should be available in the entire US. Do note that if you’ve just freshly upgraded your device to Marshmallow after updating Chase Mobile, the app may need to be reinstalled in order for its fingerprint feature to start working properly.