Frictionless Banking Requires Edge-to-Cloud Integration
The future of both corporate and retail banking is being shaped by technology.
Customers now expect more services to be available digitally and via a serve-yourself model. At the branch, many customers opt to skip the line for everyday transactions and account maintenance, making banking more digital than ever.
Meanwhile, corporate and retail banks are unlocking insights and competitive advantages through analytics, big data, and AI. These technologies help banks find opportunities to boost their bottom line, mitigate risks, and improve the customer experience—both online and in the branch. Connected devices located in branch offices help banks gain insights into customer behavior and deliver more-tailored offerings to those they serve—ultimately facilitating a frictionless experience that’s focused on customer needs, regardless of how they’re interacting with the bank.
To make it all possible, a range of technologies are being deployed, from edge compute solutions in branches to high-performance data center environments. Let’s examine some of the key technologies that are helping to define the future of banking.
The Edge: Enabling the Connected Branch
Digital technology is essential to ensuring that branch banking remains relevant, resilient against cyber threats, competitive, and profitable. Self-service options, IoT sensors, and AI are being deployed to offer customers new services, identify business needs, and uncover new growth opportunities.
In branch locations, technologies such as dynamic digital signage and self-service kiosks leverage cloud-based analytics and AI technologies to streamline customer visits and deliver more-personalized experiences.
What’s making it possible? Thanks to intelligence at the edge, analytics insights are no longer limited to the data center.
New Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are bringing analytics and AI into the branch and allowing brick-and-mortar locations to act more like online channels. For example, banks can use IP cameras and AI-powered vision technology to measure how long customers are waiting for a teller at different times of the day. These insights can help branch managers make better-informed staffing decisions.
Globally, more than 85 percent of consumers have used a self-service kiosk and are comfortable with their experience.1 The newest generation of self-service kiosks goes beyond what traditional ATMs can do. Not only can customers withdraw cash and make deposits, but they can also open accounts, review their investment portfolios, explore upgrades and perks, pay bills, and more. They can complete all these tasks anytime that’s convenient for them, even outside banking hours.
One Intel partner reports that its self-service banking kiosks have led to a 20 to 30 percent ticket lift on average, along with higher customer retention and lower overhead.2
One Intel partner reports that its self-service banking kiosks have led to a 20 to 30 percent ticket lift on average, along with higher customer retention and lower overhead.2
Paired with cloud resources and AI technologies, self-service kiosks embedded with opt-in facial recognition can identify if an unauthorized user tries to access an account, block the transaction, and capture images of the thief. Digital signage embedded with vision capabilities can “see” who is looking at the display and change messages based on the audience.
Likewise, banking digital signage makes a big impression on customers while they’re in the branch. It’s also a great way to share messages while customers are waiting for a teller, manager, or consultant. Digital signage near the entrance or in the lobby of a branch is ideal for high-level brand messages that reassure customers that the bank or credit union is a trusted partner in their financial goals. As customers move into transactional spaces, digital signage can promote banking products and services. Built-in video analytics makes it possible to show customized content based on audience demographics.
However, putting many technologies to use in real-time requires financial organizations to process large volumes of data. It also presents a challenging migration away from legacy channels such as traditional ATMs. Flexible and open edge computing solutions will help extend siloed, legacy systems with modern capabilities—which also facilitates the data analytics that banks need for rapid, actionable insights. Enhanced visibility and the influx of data from the edge will help banks make better decisions about everything from loan offers to in-branch staffing.
Using edge technologies, banks will be able to realize additional innovative solutions that help improve the customer experience, such as:
- Virtual teller machines: AI-enabled options for transactional needs that reduce wait times and streamline customer visits.
- Virtual avatars: A nonverbal AI solution that enhances user interaction with self-service kiosks and allows for customer experience measurement.
- Safety and security: Automated detection of security risks using computer vision technologies.
The branch office and network edge are essential elements of the future of banking. Intel is dedicated to maximizing the potential of both. Intel® Core™ processors deliver a strong foundation for digital signage and self-service kiosks, supporting ultrahigh definition (UHD) visuals and responsive touchscreens.
In addition, the Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO™ toolkit streamlines the development of computer vision applications to add capabilities like audience analytics to digital signage and kiosk solutions.
Biometric security can help financial institutions go about their everyday operations while improving customer experiences and authenticity.
Efficient and Secure IT Management for Corporate and Retail Banking
In banking, thin clients provide reassurance that data and confidential information are kept secure and that the bank adheres to regulatory standards. Thin client computing also demonstrates lower operating costs thanks to streamlined IT management—as well as significantly lower security risks. In the thin-client model, all critical data is stored in centralized data center environments, helping to safeguard access while also streamlining overall IT management operations.
Cloud and Data Center: New Possibilities for Banking
Banks are also leveraging cloud technology to improve their customer experiences and enable new capabilities.
Cloud Banking IT: Opportunities and Challenges
Historically, banks have lagged in their adoption of cloud technologies due to the highly regulated nature of the industry and specific requirements related to the banking.
As they pursue their digital goals, corporate and retail banks face challenges in the adoption of cloud computing. Cloud banking IT strategies—including both hybrid and multicloud approaches—must balance costs, performance, complex regulatory guidelines, and the need for stringent cybersecurity measures.
In recent years, new innovations have helped to address the compliance challenges within the industry and unlocked new ways for banks to better serve their customers.
Banks use cloud resources—frequently powered by Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors—for workloads such as risk management analytics and financial modeling simulations. They also rely on the cloud for tools such as HR systems, collaboration solutions, and disaster recovery. Mission-critical banking applications tend to remain in the core data center, where banks have total control and visibility alongside isolation from the internet.
Success with a cloud banking IT strategy requires careful selection of the workloads offloaded to cloud. Many banks use risk assessments to understand the advantages, disadvantages, and potential pitfalls of a migration.
As in other regulated industries, confidential computing technologies such as Intel® Software Guard Extensions enable corporate and retail banks to deploy workloads in the cloud with greater confidence and increased security. Using these technologies, banks can run public cloud workloads in private enclaves that help protect their in-use data from processes operating at higher privilege levels. Without validated code, access is denied to the enclave—including access by the cloud provider. Among other use cases, banks employ these enclaves to bring multiple data sources together for deeper machine learning analysis while complying with many data sovereignty regulations.
Cloud also plays an integral role in supporting the modern development frameworks such as DevOps and DevSecOps that banks and financial institutions use to build software applications. Cloud resources help them accelerate the testing and validation of new applications—speeding time to market for new services and customer-facing offerings. In these models, confidential-computing enclaves can be applied to secure the continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines that are used to quickly test and deploy new applications. Intel works with a wide range of cloud partners—including industry leaders such as Red Hat and VMware—to enable the flexibility, security, and performance required by cloud banking deployments.
Learn more about how Intel is helping make the cloud more powerful, protected, and accessible.
AI and Analytics in the Data Center
With the widespread adoption of online and mobile banking, financial institutions have more data available to help them make smarter decisions, better understand customer needs, and deliver stronger offerings to customers.
For example, we’re helping DataCubes deliver AI solutions that use machine learning and computer vision to reduce insurance underwriting risks. And we’re helping Proportunity deliver attractive loans to first-time home buyers through machine learning.
A big data platform, often enabled by the cloud, can take banking analytics to a new level and help institutions create new products and services or improve the delivery of existing ones. Cloud and data center resources leverage solutions such as Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors to deliver the computational horsepower required for complex banking analytics.
Financial institutions also employ AI to improve efficiency, enhance services, mitigate risk, detect fraud, predict trends, and manage regulatory compliance. Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors offer integrated AI and accelerations such as Intel® AVX-512 and Intel® Deep Learning Boost to help make it possible. These processors also help power customer service chatbots and virtual assistants that streamline the experience for corporate and retail bank customers.
Using computer vision and machine learning AI solutions, such as those enabled by the Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO™ Toolkit, banks can further bridge the digital and physical worlds. By allowing banks to analyze and generate insights from in-branch cameras, these tools help banks improve the customer experience, better understand in-branch behavior, and enhance overall decision-making.
Find out more about how Intel is unlocking new possibilities for AI analytics.
The Future of Banking Is Powered by Intel
As corporate and retail banks continue to innovate and unlock new possibilities, Intel is dedicated to providing the performance, flexibility, and security they require in the branch and in the data center. Across AI, analytics, cloud, and beyond, we’re helping banks enable breakthroughs, protect operations, and increase business results as they build the future of the financial industry.