Covid demands AI powered Conversational Video Banking powered by Hybrid Cloud

Let's review 2020. What COVID has taught enterprises in general and banks in particular? The number on learning has been that digital way of engaging with customers is key and conversational video is can make it practically adoptable. Technologies like Augmented Reality (AR)/ Virtual Reality (VR) can make the engagement immersive as well.

 What banks really experiencing is that they have to have not just a contingency plan but a plan in place for their employees to work remotely which has never really been done in banking before.  Banks need to have digital plans for all major business and IT functions:

1. How acquisition side of getting new customers should not get hampered in covid times

2. How the servicing side from a customer service and a retention perspective should not get hampered.

To deal with COVID created situation, should banks/ financial institutions build technology solutions on their on-premises infrastructure? I suggest that the existing investment in on-premise infrastructure should be leveraged to the extent possible but use a public cloud like AWS / Azure /GCP along with on-premise cloud.

Public cloud provides far better technologies of AR/VR, Conversational technologies like Alexa, live video and voice streaming technologies.

 Other reasons of having a hybrid cloud (consisting of on-premise cloud and one or more public cloud) are:

1.    On-premise cloud infrastructure can be sized only for average traffic load rather than peak load. Public cloud should be used for catering to all traffic bursts that happen usually on very few days in a year. This will keep the overall cost of infra low.

2.    Dev, test environment are not used 24x7. They are usually used 8 hrs and 5 days. So why provision that on on-premise? Keep such environments’ workload on public cloud where you pay only for what you use.

3.    The Covid challenge needs Business to generate new ideas at a frequent and regular pace. Public cloud is far more suitable for testing ideas, conducting POCs at affordable cost that does not demand upfront investment.

Why Video banking?

During the COVID situation, it is imperative for many of the bank’s employees to work from. But if you look at role of relationship managers, business lending, loan officers, digital and cloud technologies can bring a shift in the way of providing remote financial advice to customers. Using AI and machine learning, these roles can be executed partially - reducing some %age of dependency on human beings. Banks should consider this mechanism of offering remote advice through video using immersive technologies of AR/VR, Alexa, real-time voice and video streaming. Thus Video Banking can a big trend in 2021 and hybrid cloud technologies can delivery it quickly and economically.

 Every industry has experienced such a rise in video, video conferencing. Schools and OPD doctors have started working on these lines. Everybody is now comfortable being on video. Video banking can move the needle on the acquisition side.

And by having the digital face to face relationships, It's going to increase that retention for banks.

In the Pre covid era, digital engagement was more of a convenience factor. But now being safe is the highest priority of bank’s employees and customers.  

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