September 7 is an auspicious date for Apple. The tech juggernaut is expected to announce the launch of its latest mobile offering, the iPhone 7. And later this fall, Apple will begin allowing third-party apps to access Siri's program interface. What the latter means for financial institutions respective banking apps remains unclear.
"It always comes down to ease-of-use. Right now, I think Siri is more of a 'cool factor' than a 'function factor,'" said Kevin Wright, CIO for the Lake Mary, Fla.-based CFE Federal Credit Union. And while Wright is intrigued by the possibility of fusing Siri into the CU's existing banking application, he said his team is taking a measured approach.
"If I'm looking at users who have a disability, this is a godsend because it gives them another methodology to access their accounts," said Wright. "But until Siri is so good that it can pick up a member's inflection and be faster than clicking a few buttons, I don't think it will be picked up by the masses."
Gerard du Toit, head of Bain and Company's Banking Practice for the Americas, said Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana and Facebook's Messenger Platform are all pursuing "a different variant of this same strategy of making is easier, simpler and more natural" to interact with businesses through a simple platform.
"In many ways, this is the battle for the next evolution of Google search, which has become the dominant way to find information," said du Toit. "These platforms want to become the dominant way to interact with businesses."
Voice Is A Different Animal
While voice-driven applications can be fun to use and even helpful (e.g., where is the closest gas station?), integrating voice commands with a CU's banking app is not as easy as asking Siri how to do it.
"Speech is a very different animal and must be approached differently in terms of the user experience," said John Best CEO of the Tampa, Fla.-based Best Innovation Group (BIG), a technology innovation and development company focused on the financial services industry.
"There is some chance that you completely blow it in the speech area and members have such a poor experience that they don't come back to this channel," said Best. "It is always a danger with being an early adopter. Rebuilding credibility can be difficult."
There have been examples of early adopter pitfalls, such as remote deposit check capture. At its onset, check validation imaging software wasn't reliable, explained Best.
"In some cases people tried it and had trouble getting checks through," said Best. "Members who tried and couldn't get it to work had to be persuaded to come back and try again."
Last year, American Express, Discover Financial Services, and later JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, set the pace in the financial industry by allowing customers to log in to their mobile apps via a finger print. Accessing Siri via a mobile app is an extension of this ease-of-use banking movement.
Over the last 18 months, Wright and his team, in partnership with Fiserv, have been working out the kinks to integrate Apple's Touch ID functionality into CFE Federal's banking app, which is expected launch in October 2016. And it's for good reason — the $1.7 billion CU supports more than 150,000 members. Wright explained that 63,000 members log into the mobile app at least once and month and 68% of those members use an iOS Apple device.
"Ever since Apple released Touch ID, our members wanted it. We see it as nothing but positive and it tags along with the security of the devise," said Wright. "On the Siri issue, we are having discussions on whether we will integrate it with our vendor or in-house as we do a lot of our own development. The Touch ID is harder [to launch] in that it ties back to the manufacturer."
Siri: Is My Card Top Of Wallet?
Financial institutions integrating Touch ID, Apple Pay, Siri and the like hope to ensure top-of-wallet status — whichever credit/debit card Siri, for example, can access for various payments (e.g., ordering Chinese food or pizza) will be the lead card.
"The most obvious immediate banking application is of course payments, where the payment mechanism is behind the scenes with whatever is on file," said du Toit. "Hence the early moves by Amex, Discover and the like, who want to be first in this wallet of this virtual agent and find ways to mitigate the inevitable intermediation."
As is the case with all new technology interfaces, there isn't a roadmap to follow. And since voice-driven applications are a new medium, Best said there is much to be learned, but added that early adopters will inform the narrative.
"Speech is not like the web where this is a well-documented pattern to follow in terms of how you setup your information," said Best, whose firm has been working with credit unions, including CFE Federal CU, on Amazon Alexa-related studies.
"If you get in early enough, you can innovate in this space and be known as an innovator," he added. "Speech is less user-interface intensive, and as a result there isn't as much risk because it's easy to change something that doesn't work."
Being an early adopter on new technologies is almost always an expensive proposition. Bain's du Toit said the big banks will likely invest "massively" into speech technology since they have the budget and are able take a long view.
"The challenge for smaller credit unions is to avoid getting left behind if this new way of interacting takes off," said du Toit. "Most credit unions will initially need to get benefits of 'virtual scale' by demanding that their technology service providers develop 'plug and play' solutions for them to configure and use with the Apple Siris of the world, rather than invest in building and integrating their own proprietary solutions."
Regarding du Toit's latter point, CFE Federal CU may be unique in that Wright and his team may integrate Siri in-house. Whether this is the case or Wright works with a vendor, he expects to have Siri incorporated into the CU's mobile banking app by mid-2017.
"With the enabling of Siri, we think we may be able to do it with the existing APIs that are available to us, but we are just starting to investigate that," he said. "I think it will take less time to do than Touch ID."
For those credit unions that are looking at developing a voice/speech mobile app offering, Best implored executives not to emulate its mobile or web experience. He said that voice is an entirely different platform and should be viewed horizontally and not vertically.
"Unlike a website where you might have to click several times to get to the information you want, a voice service can be designed in such a way that you can intuitively learn what to ask and go right to something you need," said Best. "Voice needs a habit forming use case, like asking for a balance or asking what a routing number is. This approach will prevent the user from trying it once and then moving on."
