#Five Technology Trends That Will Disrupt Your Banking Style To improve customer experience, technology disruption is the way forward

We all know blockchain as technology is going to disrupt, create sort of transparency and increase accountability in the banking process. But, it's not just blockchain that is leading the big change in the banking industry.

Going forward, the digital revolution in the traditional banking area is going to be all about improving customer experiences along with an increase in accountability.

Accenture in its recent report, Banking Technology Vision 2018, makes a note of five such technology trends which the global firm believes has the potential to generate the next wave of industry disruption in the banking sector.

Artificial Intelligence

Even though artificial intelligence (AI) as a term has started buzzing very recently, banks have been using the technology to automate repetitive and rule asked manual task since last 20 years with the emergence of first neutral neural networks for automated credit decisioning.

Since then AI evolved in various dimensions. Apart from interacting with the humans both customers and compliment employees, the machine can display humour, emotional sensitivity, and other very human traits.

According to Accenture survey, 79 percent of bankers believe that within the next two years, AI will work next to humans in their organizations as a co-worker, collaborators, and trusted advisor.

"They also expect that the majority of bank-customer interactions will be conducted via AI in the next few years, making machines the "face" of the organization. One of the more visible signs of this trend is the emergence of collaborative robots or robots that work alongside humans to help them do their jobs better and give customers a better banking experience," the report added.

As the trends start to kick in, it suggests bankers to introduced AI in phased manners, expect new job roles to emerge, identify how it cast a positive impact across business verticals and build a collaborative partnership with regulators.

Extended Reality

Extended reality, which includes virtual reality, augmented reality along with mixed reality, are narrowing the distance between customer and experiences. In fact, according to Gartner by 2019, almost 20 percent of the large-sized companies will adopt extended reality.

Accenture notes that with this technology, which is not just another video medium, companies can look at creating competitive differentiation simply by overlaying the real world with digital enhancements to extend human reality.

Data Veracity

Traditionally, banks have always been the powerhouse of data through multiple yet authentic sources. However, with the emergence of open data policy and access to accessibility to government and third-party databases or even interaction on social media, data generation has simply doubled but not verified.

However, Accenture says, if banks fail to verify the authenticity of the data, they are vulnerable to draw business insights or make decision which can get them into various unwanted mess.

"As the Internet of Things, Open Banking APIs, and AI increase the flow of that data, banks will need to deal with both the upside and the downside risk of having a privileged place in the economy. Customers understand that their data has value and are beginning to demand reciprocity," the report pointed out.

Frictionless Business

As a matter of fact, we all know fintech companies are banks new best friend on the block. According to the report, the number of bank's partners has nearly doubled in the last two years.

Even though banks have always been known to unique partnership quality, but most of them have traditional inflexible technology platform as against the present day plug and play models.

"Legacy banking systems were not built to support high metabolism, technology-based partnerships. Instead, they were built in silos intended to operate only within the walls of the business and with the assumption that change would be slow and steady. Now, as banks expand their networks, participate in diverse ecosystems, and shift partners within them, outdated systems that cannot keep pace are becoming a material barrier to growth and future readiness," the report added.

And hence, Accenture believes the solution to this universal problem is looking Microservices, wherein you break down your big monolithic applications into very small, loosely coupled components, along with blockchain to improve efficiency and accountability.

Internet of Thinking

Wouldn't it be wonderful, if banks would collaborate with your telecom service provider, analyze data shared with your consent to offer real-time bespoke services?

To deliver such intelligence, the report shares, the banks must manage the complexity of unpredictable, external, and physical world interactions.

"Businesses must shift event-driven analysis and decision processing closer to points of interaction, and data generation closer to the edge of networks. Without doing so, banks won't be able to produce the sophisticated, intelligent experiences in robotics, immersive reality, artificial intelligence, or the Internet of Things on which their next generation of strategies is built," Accenture advised.