Citizens Financial Group Inc. is taking a page from Hollywood in its test of in-branch videoconferencing. But the movie-star touch isn't the high-definition video screens — it's the pens used to sign important documents.
In its multistate, 16-branch trial, Citizens, of Providence, R.I., is pairing Cisco Systems Inc. videoconferencing equipment with Syngrafii Corp.'s Longpen, which tries to address the persistent customer fear that when signing documents remotely using a tablet, they can't be sure what they're signing.
With Longpen, Syngrafii vice president Martin Warren said, customers see the document they're signing on a screen and can watch as a remote mechanical arm duplicates their signature and even pen pressure. The product "started as a celebrity fan interaction tool," he said, allowing stars to produce wet ink signatures without actually attending fan events.
Citizens, a unit of Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC, said that this feature, along with recent advancements in the quality of video interaction, make such a setup more viable today. "People have tried a lot of different things, but it's always been on horrible video conferences where there's a delay and it's never been seamless," said Theresa McLaughlin, Citizens' group executive vice president and chief marketing officer.
Citizens is conducting the videoconferencing trial to see if it can bring complex services such as asset management or mortgage work, complete with "wet ink" signatures, to branches and in-store locations without financial advisers present. The goal isn't cost-cutting, the bank says, but to widen service.
Citizens hopes to differentiate itself to customers who already "use technology for convenience," McLaughlin said. "This is not a play to reduce the number of staff we have in order to save money."
Bob Meara, a Celent analyst who follows banking technology, said that outside of cases in which the signature technology can be used to alleviate standard paperwork delays, customers are unlikely to find videoconferencing to be a superior experience to human interaction.
But the technology could allow Citizens to provide reasonable and fast service to a wider audience than it could otherwise afford to. "The gist of this is taking costs out of the system," he said.
Because Syngrafii's Longpen stores a digital copy while producing a print signature, it's a bridge technology suited to environments where there's a need to digitize but the production and circulation of documents is still essential to a company's workflow. From a legal standpoint it is no more or less binding than other e-signatures, Warren said.
While Longpen has been built into Cisco's videoconferencing for use in certain legal and government settings, and was used by an offshore bank for certain employee-to-employee transactions, it's never previously been presented to customers, he said.
However, early results of its test suggest that Longpen makes people more comfortable. As a customer uses it on a tablet displaying the document to be signed, a video feed shows them the physical document being signed.
"We've found customers are much more accepting of that," he said, describing Longpen as a "baby step" approach to digitization.
McLaughlin said Citizens wasn't yet sure where and to what extent it will make the technology available. Half of the company's pilot locations are at in-store branches where space, and therefore services are often limited. The bank hopes to learn where and when customers will use the conferencing, and how their use varies by time of day and location.
Meara complimented the combination of videoconferencing with a hybrid physical and e-signature capacity as being a potentially invaluable stepping stone toward fully digitizing transactions. He also said there's merit to Citizens' contention that videoconferencing technology has shed many of its less pleasant quirks.
"Camera prices, video compression and customer experience have just gotten much, much better," he said.
But Meara said he doubted whether Citizens' pilot program was at the vanguard of an imminent rush toward videoconferencing adoption. A survey Celent did in July of last year found that only 5% of banks with assets over $1 billion used videoconferencing with customers in any capacity, and just 10% more were actively planning to deploy such a system. When customers step into branches, he said, banks seem to be inherently uncomfortable with steering them toward a screen.
"Because of the culture, I don't think it's going to be commonplace anytime soon," Meara said, citing some retail banking executives' reluctance to place automated teller machines inside a branch. "I'm not saying that's for any good reason."
