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Written by John Bertrand, Industry Value Engineer - Banking at SAP

Thanks to advanced technologies, we now have natural language robotics and facial recognition that can measure and match unique characteristics for the purposes of authentication and identification. With personalised assistance machines, we are more able to detect, prevent and deal with various threats on society. In the digital world, facial biometrics have the potential to be integrated anywhere you can find a camera. This is what we can expect to have next on our mobile phones. Biometric devices, with today’s data storage capabilities and fantastic speed of processing gives us great clarity in seconds. These once unrealistic, fantasy technologies are suddenly becoming commonplace in our day-to-day lives enabling us to transact as fast as any dealing room.

Customers expect personalised services and this demand has now spread to financial services. Bank clients also demand the security offered by banks needs to be extended into cyber for all our protection. To this end, RBS recently rolled out fingerprint identification for customers on mobile banking apps and Halifax trialled heartbeat ID Technology for people using wearable technology. From April 2018 Visa is offering fingerprint recognition for the card user and merchant, seeing better security and convenience around card payments without changing the existing infrastructure. Once the fingerprint is enrolled, the user only needs to place the finger on the card to authenticate their identity and initiate payment.

Apple has taken security and convenience one step further by adding face recognition. Bordering on science fiction, the face recognition feature opens the phone and payments can be made from it without the user having to remember increasingly complex passwords.

This reflects the growing need for banks to provide customers with greater convenience, personalisation, immediacy and security, as failure to do so risks losing market and mindshare to more agile and innovative competitors.

Personalisation with predictive analytics

mBank has been a leader in innovative banking solutions for years. It was the first fully Internet-based bank in Poland. Today it sets the direction of mobile and online banking development by offering its customers a completely new, easy way to do banking and insurance. Using predictive Analytics has enabled mBank to discover individual customer preferences and identify the next best activity for its marketing efforts. Now the bank can initiate more direct conversations, resulting in a better understanding of its clients and generating revenue growth.

With predictive modelling in place, mBank is prepared to respond and create the next big trend on the horizon. While it’s difficult to gain customer trust when it comes to personal finance, mBank is doing an excellent job of earning that trust and with this insight of its 4.5 million-customer base to drive business forward and make personal banking even more personalised.

Know Your Customer Well 

Digital, mobile-only banking is taking personalisation to a whole new level. Banks can use the data on its customers spending habits to advise them how to save money. By analysing the data, banks are able to offer financial advice based on its customers’ spending patterns to help them budget responsibly and find the best deals. In the age of immediacy, the app updates a user’s balance instantly and sends intelligent notifications. This will help to bind the bank to their clients on a much more personalised basis and enhance existing trust.

Legacy systems are like bottlenecks across the banking highway – Let’s accelerate with APIs

Established players must engage customers with a real-time, multichannel digital experience, and make the most of innovative technologies. The old legacy systems are batch processing orientated. The bank culture may be conservative and management tied to old business processing but help is at hand. New technology applications are available on a cost-as-used basis and scalable as demand increases. Banks can overlay this new technology over the legacy systems with the use of APIs which are becoming standard across the industry.

This new technology is here, available to all and will provide both opportunities and threats going forward, from novelty to necessity at the speed of light.

This article was originally published here and was reposted with permission.

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