Bank@Home - Using Amazon Echo
In my previous post Contextual Banking in Digital Lifestyle, I highlighted the relevance of contextual services in banking industry. These services manifest differently on different channels where it becomes prominent to build an intuitive UI. But as someone said, "the best UI is to have No UI at all". Instead, use voice and gestures. If done well, this mode of communication could offer to be the most versatile, efficient and innovate way to engage customers and allow them to express their intent and commands most efficiently.
As the IDEO’s Design Thinking recommends, the best solution is at the intersection of desirability, viability, and feasibility. While we should certainly strive to balance all three factors to create an optimal solution, for this exploratory thought experiment, I’ll focus on the desirability factor to begin with and expand on the user needs of such a device-enabled solution.
With that background set, here lets explore few aspects of the interaction to better position the device in our digital lifestyle.
Motivation
Amazon Echo provides a hands-free, voice-control manner to play music, control smart home, or in general obtain information on news, sports, weather, schedules, and so forth. As this connected lifestyle is becoming a potential reality, not in the distant future but right now, managing customers' financial health and executing day-to-day transactions would not be left behind but rather becomes an integral part of customers' wired-world digital fabric.
Context
Imagine you are in the living room listening to your favorite music or watching movie on Netflix with your family around. Suddenly you remember about a pending bill payment. You now have two options. First option: Pause the music or movie. Get up to retrieve the phone or mac if not with you. Open the bank’s app or website. Navigate through its cumbersome UI to figure what is pending and when, and then schedule it. Second option: Pause the music or movie. Ask Echo, “Hey Bank, can you schedule any payments pending?”. Listen to its response. Continue with your music or movie. Which option would you prefer?
Security
This is extremely important aspect of the solution. Nothing trumps the security of the customer data. There are couple of broad approaches to evaluate:
Voice authentication: During the initial setup of the device, one could record the voice of all authorized users and link to their respective bank accounts.
Use nearby devices to authenticate: Link Echo to other devices with a camera or thumbprint or keyboard to provide the credentials
For certain transactions as money transfer, we could employ both, similar to two-factor authentication
Location
This is an auxiliary but quite powerful feature when executed correctly. Tracking users location is controversial. Its critical to build the solution to let the customers decide and explicitly opt-in to avail this feature. In any case, Amazon Echo learning that customers are at their home might not be exactly same as tracking customers’ location using their mobile phone. In any case, assuming we have customers’ permission, the fact that Amazon Echo can know when customers are at their home can become a key data point in transaction processing and fraud detection. If they are at home and we detect a in-store card transaction, or an online transaction not originating from home location, then we can immediately trigger an alarm, quickly check with the customers and deal with it in realtime.
Why only Amazon Echo? I have taken Amazon Echo as an example device. In fact, our potential solution would work exactly same for any voice-enabled device.
As the adoption gains traction, I’m sure newer and much more intricate usage scenarios will emerge. But one thing for sure - this hands-free, voice-enabled channel is poised to become a mainstream channel alongside mobile.