Here's how Widiba and Halifax are Changing the Face of Banking with Virtual and Augmented Reality
Virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) technologies are slowly coming into their own. They’ve been around for more than 30 years – however, due to historically high development costs, the complexities of AR and VR devices, and consumer adoption challenges, they haven’t found their way into the commercial world until very recently.
A major shift has also taken place over the past few years with advances in smartphone technology. Last year, Deloitte reported that the number of AR users would exceed one billion in 2018, driven by a combination of hardware and software upgrades (including the incorporation of AR functionality into smartphone operating systems), and tens of thousands of AR apps launching in app stores. Now the business world is taking notice. In Jabil’s recent Augmented and Virtual Reality Trends Survey, 69% of technology and business stakeholders said they believe AR and VR will become mainstream within the next five years.
Banking on AR
As consumer adoption of AR and VR technology takes off, there will undoubtedly be a pronounced effect on many sectors – and banking is no exception. In fact, banks from all parts of the world are already experimenting with the technology, particularly when it comes to enhancing the customer experience. One of the most exciting things about virtual and augmented reality is its ability to lift products, solutions and services out of a 2D screen and place customers right inside a digital scenario that is almost as real as real life.
Take the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Halifax in the UK, for example. Targeting bank customers looking to buy or sell a home, both banks offer AR-powered “home finder” apps, where users can hold up their phones on any street and explore properties for sale nearby, overlaid with additional data about price tendencies, current listings, local school rankings and transport links. Deeper searchers can also be performed on selected properties, with photos of floor plans available for display, plus information on monthly mortgage payments.
Elsewhere, the National Bank of Oman uses AR to allow customers to locate nearby branches and ATMs. Offers and deals can also be found while walking around shopping malls in the streets of Oman, as bank customers use their smartphone cameras to bring their real-life surroundings together as an AR projection on their phone’s screen.
But this is only the beginning. Such is the potential of VR and AR that some even bolder banks are beginning to ask a bigger question – could these technologies be somehow used to create full-scale virtual branches, where customers could get the experience of entering a physical branch from the comfort of their own homes?
Widiba Home – The Virtual Branch Is Here
It’s no secret that the rise of online and mobile banking is changing the banking landscape. As fewer and fewer customers visit their local branch, more and more of those branches are being forced to close. However, though mobile banking has undoubtedly become more advanced, personalised and convenient than ever before, it does have a downside – the lack of the human touch.
Italian bank Widiba has come up with a virtual reality solution that delivers the best of both worlds – a highly realistic virtual branch that offers personalised service with all the convenience of online banking.
The VR experience is named Widiba Home. Customers simply download the Widiba app, don a virtual reality headset, and can then enter into a virtual branch, talk to advisors, and carry out transactions. The experience is incredibly life-like. Users can navigate the branch using their voice to ask for what they want – just as they would ask a live agent in a real branch. They can browse the relevant monitors within the virtual environment to bring up balances and transactions on their account and cards, check securities and portfolio information, and make contact with personal advisors.
Widiba turned to VR solutions provider Teneo to bring its virtual branch to life. Teneo’s technology lets customers talk to the app using their own words and phrases to achieve their desired outcome. Utilising machine learning and deep analytics, Teneo interprets customers’ words, understands their intentions, and continues the conversation just like a human bank teller. It can understand complex sentences, remember facts, and helps customers complete their banking operations faster with less hassle and fewer clicks.
“Widiba Home is about taking the banking relationship back to the customer while meeting the needs of busy lifestyles by delivering the personal touch of a physical branch in a modern setting,” said CTO of Widiba, Daniela Pivato. “Teneo allows our customers to have a sophisticated conversational experience within the virtual bank that increases not only customer engagement, but enables us to continue a direct conversation with our customers online to understand their needs better and serve them more proactively.”
Final Thoughts
Could virtual branches like Widiba Home be the future of personal banking? Though it’s too early to say for sure, they certainly offer a host of benefits. Virtual branches could be incredibly useful in servicing those in remote areas, whose banking service could be almost identical to that of urban customers. And they could also provide huge savings for banks, who would no longer have to fork out huge sums maintaining thousands of increasingly redundant physical branches. In the meantime, however, it’s almost certain that we’ll see more and more banks launch VR and AR services for mobile customers as the technology continues to go mainstream.
