Bank of the Future: Technology for Client Experience

For many of the startups presenting at their stands during the 2019 Viva Technology edition, the client experience was a key theme at the heart of their proposal. Focus on some practical applications for players in the banking sector.

73% of clients feel banks have a responsibility to deliver the latest technologies according to a 2019 ING survey.

Towards the digitalization of client relationships

The concept of the client experience refers to the emotions felt by clients during their interactions — physical or digital — with a company. With the advent of new technologies, social networks, and evolutions in clients’ desires, there is a trend towards the digitalization of client relationships. But “physical” contact points remain key: there is a need to reinvent the client experience by offering paths, channels, and solutions crafted to each profile.

Today, the most widely used technologies within financial institutions are:

Augmented reality/VR
Chatbots
Hyper-geolocation
Synthetic speech
AI
Blockchain technology

A growing interest in artificial intelligence

The growing interest shown by banks in harnessing artificial intelligence to improve the client experience is evidenced by the use of virtual assistants. These incorporate word and image recognition, speech comprehension, data analysis, and prediction, all integrated into the IBM Watson adopted by Crédit Mutuel or Societe Generale’s SoBot. More recently, Orange Bank has started offering its clients the services of an augmented adviser to meet specific needs and answer their day-to-day questions.

And this trend towards more personalized client support will only grow stronger thanks to big data and deep learning derived from Machine Learning, where the machine has the capacity to learn autonomously. This paves the way to offering personalized advice on budget management, doing the groundwork prior to client meetings and reports, and more.

Current trends in client experience:

Smart stores
Responsiveness
Digital client relationship centers (CRC)
Hyper-personalization
VR
Omnichannel
Intelligent assistants
Experiential apps
Messaging
Remote experts
Chatbots
M-commerce

Some significant startups with relation to the client experience

AB Tasty

Presenting at the AWS Lab (Amazon) stand, AB Tasty is an all-in-one platform that lets companies offer an optimized and personalized client experience on their website, using a range of processes (A/B testing, marketing demonstrations, personalized interactions, predictive marketing, etc.).

Features:

Optimized and secure marketing campaigns
Fewer abandoned shopping carts thanks to identification of the user’s intention
Audience segmentation

Q°Emotion

Grégoire Pfirsh

Co-fonder of Q°Emotion

We transform client feedback into emotional analytics, which allows companies to better understand them and easily identify which actions to take as a priority.

At the Sodexo Lab stand, Q°Emotion is a startup that offers client experience professionals a powerful solution based on AI and proprietary algorithms. It detects the emotions in clients’ written opinions and comments, automatically ranks them, and lets the user easily view the results.

Partners: BNP Paribas, Caisse d’épargne, Crédit Agricole

Quicksign

At the BNP Paribas Lab stand, Quicksign is revolutionizing digital onboarding by offering a SaaS service to fully digitalize the process of opening bank accounts (identity check, management of supporting documents, signature of contracts). The digitalized process is legally compliant and offers the client fun ways to interact with the bank.

Main services on offer:

Remote KYC (Know Your Client)
E-signature
Back-office dedicated to the application approval process
Real-time statistics

Partners: Santander, BNP Paribas, Axa, Boursorama, American Express, Orange Bank

Meniga

Presenting at the Atos Lab stand, Meniga helps international financial institutions in using their data to customize digital channels and foster client engagement.

At the Paris Fintech Forum, Meniga was chosen by the BPCE group to develop its future digital services.

At Wavestone, our experts believe that the banking of tomorrow will be more distinctive, and that the client experience will become ever more personalized and adapted to individual needs. For example, in the case of Artificial Intelligence, the bank of the future could become the “segment one” model: a unique bank capable of addressing each particular client in a specific way.