How Digital Identity Raises In-Branch Trust and Convenience

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JPMorgan Chase recently made headlines with its announcement of launching 500 new branches. This trend is not isolated. According to S&P Global Market Intelligence data, the pace of bank branch closures has decelerated since mid-2022, coinciding with several major banks unveiling plans for branch openings and expansions into new markets. 

Join JPMorgan Chase and Mitek Systems for a discussion about the role of a modernized bank branch in delivering an integrated and trusted omnichannel banking experience. 

What you'll learn

Customer preferences across generations
  • The role of AI fraud prevention, digital identity verification, and biometrics in improving in-branch security, personalization, and convenience
  • How modern technology is bridging the physical and digital channels to enable a consistent and connected experience across the banking journey
Transcription:

Carter Pape (00:10):
All right. My name is Carter Pape. I'm a Reporter with American Banker. I focus on fraud and cybersecurity, and I'm excited to talk today about the changes that we're seeing in fraud and how it's coming into bank branches and what banks are doing about that, but also just how banks are changing, how their branches look. So with me, I have Stefan Schubert. Stefan is Managing Director and Head of Identity for Consumer and Community Banking at JP Morgan Chase. Stefan has 17 years of experience in the fields of fraud, authentication and identity within financial services. And then I also have Kerry Cantley. Kerry is Vice President of Digital Banking at MI Tech, which is a digital identity technology company. Kerry joined Mitek just over a year ago after a 30 year career in Financial Services that span multiple executive leadership roles at Bank of America, including Senior Vice President of Global Technology and Operations. So we'll have questions or we'll have time at the end for audience questions. So if you think of any, feel free to write 'em down. We will be able to get to 'em at the end. But I want to start with you Kerry. So just set the stage for us. We're here to discuss how digital identity raises trust and convenience in branches. Why is this topic even relevant?

Kerry Cantley (01:30):
Yeah, so let's start at the big picture, which is customers still expect in-person experiences, whether that's financial centers, branches, retail, they're looking for that customer experience, but they want you to know them. So with that, they also want to feel that their idea secure. You understand what they need, but they want that in-person experience. Over 60% of those that were recently surveyed said for significant financial matters, they want to be in person and talk to someone. One-on-one. The other thing that's interesting is you still see a lot of transactional activity in a branch. They like seeing their branch in their community. They want to be able to walk in the door when it's a complicated transaction or those day-to-day activities as needed. If for some reason they don't feel that the online interaction or process meets their needs. So they're very, very important and they like that presence in the community.

Carter Pape (02:31):
Cool. So I'll give you a few statistics, kind of set the stage a bit. My colleague Jim Dos reported earlier this year that since 2010, the trend in banking has been to close branches. There were roughly a hundred thousand bank branches in the US in 2009, and at the beginning of this year there were 80,000. But JP Morgan Chase has been bucking the trend. They had 25 net branch openings, which was the highest of any bank last year. And as an anecdotal contrast, Wells Fargo closed nearly 300 and that's kind of the high end on the other side. So in February, JP Morgan Chase announced that it plans to open more than 500 new branches and renovate thousands of locations over the next three years. So Stefan , briefly just tell us why are you opening new branches? Why are you bucking the industry trend on this?

Stefan Schubert (03:26):
We found that our branch network is really beneficial across all of our businesses. We have a San it Chase that the branch makes everyone better. So if you look at one of our branches, it's really a marketplace for different sub businesses. You've got auto loans, home mortgages, you've got consumer accounts, deposit accounts, credit cards. By having that branch anchored in the neighborhood and the community within, we're able to bolster all those services for ourselves. And there's also a much higher customer experience benefit of just both being able to visit the branch and just knowing there's a branch nearby. That's some of the things, the feedback we've gotten directly from customers is even if I'm not going to go to the branch, I do like to know that I can if I have to. So we've seen both direct financial benefits of opening more branches and we've also seen a lot of indirect customer experience benefits.

Carter Pape (04:16):
Awesome. So now let's talk about how those branches are actually changing why you're renovating and adding new ones. So how exactly are your branches going to look different in a few years compared to how they looked a few years ago? Yeah,

Stefan Schubert (04:31):
It's a good question. So one I think I want to highlight this even more critical to me personally than opening new branches is the renovations of branches that we're doing. So we're overhauling thousands of branches to better reflect the communities they serve. That can come from local artwork. We have artwork by people within a hundred miles of the branch is what we display in the branch. I think that's pretty cool. There's things like meeting places, so we're taking them away from just financial centers and also making them into more community centers. But then for the folks here, maybe more interested in as we think about how the identity technology plays a space in the branch, historically, your branches mostly and for probably most of us out here did a lot of physical verification. You walk in, I look at your idea, look at you. We're in the process of introducing as many machine-based solutions as we can to take that pressure out of the banker's hands. We want fewer systems and more services. So we don't want our employees to have to focus on learning how to navigate a bunch of different applications. This is the one I do debits in. This is the one I open up accounts. They don't want them have to do that. We want the systems to be very simple so they can focus on customer service and financial advice.

Carter Pape (05:39):
Sweet. So Kerry also interested in your perspective. JP Morgan Chase is just one of the banks that's changing how their branches are looking. How do you see other banks changing their branches and maybe talk about the pressures that are pushing 'em to do that.

Kerry Cantley (05:55):
Yeah, certainly. I think we even talked a little bit about this yesterday afternoon. Customer experience is changing however they want the people that they are interacting with to know 'em, they want them to understand, have that customized experience as they go through the process. So this is an opportunity where technology can integrate with the use of the day-to-day activities that someone has to do to service their customer. We look at the customer journey, whether that's onboarding or within the transactional processes or opening a new account or even offboarding. Those experiences are important because they want you to know them. They want you to know who I am, they want you to know what I do, and they want that interaction to be very personable. And I always say this, especially in the branch are also customers. And so if the tools and utilities that you give them to use as they interact with their customer are valuable and simple and make a lot of sense to them, then they're going to make a lot of sense to your customers.

(07:09):
So getting that feedback whenever you're launching technology is a great resource, but you've got to make it interactive. You've got to make it simple, you've got to make it usable, but it has to make sense along the way. And so I think now is the time, whether it's a renovation or an update and this omnichannel experience that says when I start in one place, mobile or online and I transition to another, I shouldn't have to repeat myself. And so making that seamless transition of experience being the same as well as seamless is very important. And I think identity verification is kind of the basis to that of I know you, you're walking in the branch maybe I thought authenticate you as you're walking in because I know you and your online mobile application and I even may know that you're there. I don't want it to feel creepy, but I want you to be aware that you are a valued customer so I know you when you walk in the door and know what you need. So those are all important factors when you think about technology integration into the customer journey that people have to take into consideration. And now I think there's so much technology that's launching in this space, it's the right time to think about that experience being the same regardless of the channel that a customer comes in through.

Stefan Schubert (08:38):
We use the term sometimes conspicuously recognized. I want to feel as I walk in that you know who I am and I want to understand how you know who I am. I don't want to just walk in and you say, hi, Mr. Schubert, I know you have a checking account with this many dollars in it. That's not a good feeling. I want you to say hi. I see actually you checked in on the app. Great, come on in, let's get you started. That's a good feeling. And I think customers appreciate the blend of technology and human service there because customers aren't binary. They don't only want to talk to a person, they don't only want to talk to a system. They want to see those things working together.

Kerry Cantley (09:11):
That's right. Yeah.

Carter Pape (09:13):
So Kerry, I'm interested. We were talking before the session a little bit about check fraud and this is one example of the forms of fraud that have been really troubling branches increasingly over recent years. So just talk a little bit about the trends that we're seeing in fraud happening in branches and some examples of what that looks like.

Kerry Cantley (09:36):
Certainly. So it goes all back to that customer journey again. So there's challenges. We all know there's all kinds of noise and authentication, bots, synthetics, mules, all of these things that are going on there. And then there's a lot going on. Authentication, account takeover, fraud is up. Again, biometrics and synthetics cause a lot of challenge with verification and some of those processes. And then there is what we call payments fraud. So check being one of those that we know has increased significantly in the last three to four years started again to rise during covid because quite honestly the branches were closed in-person verification started to drop. However the sophistication took off during that time, especially with check. So it became a marketplace and a new way to generate revenue for those that were in the fraud environment. And so they're taking advantage of the weak spots is what I call it.

(10:38):
So they're going across a community and network, a point to point of banks, they're very agile, they're very quick to communicate where those weak points are. They're willing to share information where sometimes in the industry we're not. And so we fall into the trap of the fraud perpetrates itself consistently in a cycle because we have the eye problem and the me problem versus the we problem. And so there's a lot of ways to approach that, starting with ID verification, ensuring that when they walk in the door, they are who they say they are when they open an account, they are who they say they are. And putting the right technology for identity verification, including validation not only of the document, but that the person is real and they say who they are. And then along the customer journey, taking that data. And if you know me, making sure that you use the data appropriately.

(11:39):
We talked about friction in the right places to prevent versus detect fraud and start to focus on really understanding the customer behaviors to put that right friction in place. So whether that's in authentication or payments, and this is all kind of hitting the branches again, right? Because it is more complicated to know is that person real? We're seeing trends like in scams or changes in phone number where you're actually calling the fraudster to verify that it is their check and it really isn't them. So they're very sophisticated as an industry and as a bank, you got to put those right technologies in place and put those in the hands of anyone in the branch, anyone that's in your call center, whatever you can do to advance those technologies and they have to be integrated. It's about who we are and what we do. That's the most important way to detect fraud today and it needs to be real time after the fact is going to maybe stop some losses, but your customer experience is going to be impacted. The person that has that fraud perpetrated on is going to feel that if you're not doing it real time. And you've got to have those protections constantly being evolved.

Stefan Schubert (13:00):
So there's a couple things that reminds me of one, I did mention this yesterday, I think it's a funny anecdote. When I started at Chase, I started in fraud, fraud investigations for digital fraud. And I remember I was cross-trained on how to do check fraud and I specifically remember my trainer saying, this will be good for a couple years until we get rid of checks 17 years ago. How's that working out? Yeah, I've been hearing that checks are going away for 17 years and I don't think they are

Kerry Cantley (13:23):
Billions.

Stefan Schubert (13:25):
And we talked yesterday about what do we think is driving that check fraud increase. For me, I think a lot of it is that as we push more and more transaction volume to digital, we have better data modeling, we have better tracking, there's more signals. I can see your device information, I can see your geolocation, I can see if that's out of pattern for you in a branch. It's all human. It's much harder to capture those signals. So you have to think a little bit less about advanced statistical models and more about upfront identity proofing and making sure you have the right person in the first place

Kerry Cantley (13:54):
And indicators of the check itself. So that's where consortiums and broader sharing of data is so important, but it has to be fast. The performance, if the customer or whoever is standing in front of you, they're not willing to wait. You've got to do it right. You want it to be secure. These are folks that have that person in front of them. This isn't an online or mobile transaction. So you got to think about the security and trust factors that that plays into it when you consider what you're doing in your branches.

Carter Pape (14:25):
So Stefan, one of the things that I see as a reporter, I have to look at things skeptically and so making things digital in the branch, one of the potential problems I think might be depersonalizing the branch, which is of course the key thing that's supposed to be personal in banking. So talk about how JP Morgan Chase is trying to address that potential issue of having things depersonalized.

Stefan Schubert (14:51):
So don't judge my character. I use a lot of metaphors rounding around bars. So if you go to a bar, nobody has a favorite bouncer. No one's like, I love that guy that checks my id. He's the best. You might have a favorite bartender. That's the person that gives you service that's personalized. So I think our strategy is more I will take the authentication identity decision and I'll make that as machine-based as possible. Sorry, am I not? There we go. There you go. I'll make that as machine-based as possible. But the actual service, the guiding me on what accounts to open, thinking through what financial products I need, that's deeply personal and we're not really looking to automate a lot of that. And what we've found since starting that journey is the more we can automate and machine base our authentication and identity decisions, the better solutions we can build. Because now I have a data audit trail that lets me know specifically what thing went wrong and which case maybe this customer couldn't get serviced because of X very specific reason. Historically I would just have to sort of guess that maybe this Id didn't look right, but now I actually have data I can look at to make a much better decision.

Kerry Cantley (15:57):
Well, and customers are willing to take the time if you're servicing them, right? So that's where brand and customer experience comes into play. If I want that personal service, take the extra five minutes and give me that personal service and I'm going to come back with repeat product asks. So making it personalized is important. Knowing how I want to interact in the branch while taking all the complex processes of verification and all that, that can't be done by a human anymore. They're too good. The fraud's too good. You've got to know and you've got to have the technology to support that. But customer service has to be personalized and that's how you're going to maintain that relationship.

Stefan Schubert (16:39):
It's really unfair to ask our bankers to be experts in that too. They have to know so many financial products and so many rules and regulations and guidelines already to then say, I also want you to know what a Hawaiian ID looks like. And I know you're in a New York branch, but that's your job too. That's just not fair. So we'd much rather take that out of their hands and let them free up that mental real estate to focus on what they're good at.

Kerry Cantley (17:02):
And we can't rely on gut. We have an industry that has a lot of experience in it, right? Deep experience. And for so long you'd have your great teller and she was the gut checker, right? And they'd check the check and be like, yeah, yeah, this one's good, that it doesn't work that way anymore. The fraud is too good.

Carter Pape (17:22):
So Stefan, you're talking about how this technology makes it easier for associates or tellers to do their job, but on the other side they have new technology in the branches that maybe they have to learn. So talk a bit about are you having to upskill your tellers? Are you having to look for new skills in new hires as you bring this technology into branches?

Stefan Schubert (17:46):
Yeah, it's a great question. I'll say this again. If we required upskilling and retraining or rehiring, we've done a really bad job. I'm a product owner. My job is to make good products. We talk about the employee experience almost as much as the customer experience. So when we launch a new service, we will train our employees for it. But ideally they shouldn't have to be trained at all. They should just understand it intuitively. At Chase, we have several branch innovation labs where you can go and we physically will mock up like a banker's desk and we'll mock up the technology and actually see what it looks like. We'll look at how does it feel ergonomically? Is this on the wrong side of the desk? Is that going to be awkward for you? So we spend a lot of time thinking about the employee experience so that the employees don't have to think about the experience.

Kerry Cantley (18:31):
Don't forget about your left-handed people. We're people too. People are people too. Please

Stefan Schubert (18:37):
The left or sinister hand.

Carter Pape (18:42):
So Kerry, JP Morgan Chase doing this is one thing, bringing this technology into their branches, that's one thing. But of course credit unions, community banks, even regional banks are going to be interested in this eventually. So talk about just are these changes going to be accessible to them and maybe on what timeline will it be able to, will your local credit union be able to change their branches the way JP Morgan Chase is?

Kerry Cantley (19:08):
Yeah. What's interesting is credit unions, those are members and members, they have a special way of relating from a customer experience perspective and they want to maintain that. So I think regardless of the type of bank or branch or capability you provide to your customers, all of these things are important. You've got to start with what do I want my customer experience to look like? And then what is the technology that supplements that to make it safe and secure? I think if we start with the end in mind, which is the customer, which we all are and we all have to interact with the service providers that we have, what do we want it to look and feel like and then apply the technology across that experience to make it seamless With today's environment of all of the challenges of fraud bot synthetic, we talked about there's opportunities.

(20:12):
We've got to start thinking about technology that can and detect that in a way that customers understand. It's the like, why are you doing this and what are you doing? And that communication needs to be there, but the technology's available regardless of how big the bank is, how small it is that there are credit union or financial large bank like JPMC. It's just a matter of how do I apply that appropriately in a customer experience. And then at MindTech, some of the focus that we have is we have identity, we have identity when it comes to biometrics. So validation of the identity verification process of document biometrics, looking for those areas of risk when it comes to synthetics and injection attacks. But we also have a check fraud consortium. At the end of the day, I think you have to bring the who I am and what I do together to make it feel right.

(21:18):
If I do a Zelle payment to my daughter who's in college every month for a thousand dollars, you should know that and stop asking me. But if I do a $10,000 payment to Stephen here, and I've never done that before, and by the way, that's a brand new phone that Stefan has and the ten's wrong and all of those things you should ask me and say, I call it the are you? Sure? Sure. Right. And scammers and fraudsters take advantage of emotion. If we can slow that emotion down, have our customers stop thinking, we ask them the right questions, I think we can provide that service to them in a way that they go, wow, my bank is protecting me versus my bank is annoying me, so I'm never going to listen to their notifications. So we've got to make sure that we really know our customers deep. It's got to be broad and it's got to be deep. And I think technology like what we're bringing together does that and that's what you're going to need those entry points of all the way through the customer journey are going to be important.

Carter Pape (22:16):
So Stefan , I'm interested in whether you can share early outcomes from the changes that you've been bringing to branches. Maybe just starting with how branch employees are embracing, are they embracing the changes or rejecting it?

Stefan Schubert (22:32):
That's a good question. We spent a lot of time, I told my team as we're getting ready to roll out that we have to almost sell this to our employees first. As someone who started out in an operation center, I know how easy it is for that frontline employee to just sort of steer away from that tool. So if the tool isn't working, our bankers probably wouldn't use it and then we would go into a spiral of it never working. So super important as we worked with our employees in the field before we launched to make sure and understanding, we test it at a small scale than a medium scale than a large scale. We found at launch a lot of really positive feedback about feeling that I no longer have to focus on something which is not my specialty. I put this ID card in this machine, I get a result, I I'm good to go.

(23:14):
There's been some downside when it becomes too automagic and people stop thinking about what else do I need to think about? They sort of assume it's valid. So we've had some missteps there and then what we're working through now is how to scale it even faster because it's been successful. There's some customer niches. It fits absolutely brilliantly for most of you. If you walk into a branch, you're probably going to use your debit and pin to authenticate what If you're one of those 30% of people who don't have a debit card and pin, we need good options for you. So finding the right niche to deploy the solution in building the right employee experience were critical and that drove a good customer experience. So let's say it's not without issues, but we're definitely looking to expand the model.

Carter Pape (23:56):
Cool. And can you talk a little bit about also how customers are responding to the changes?

Stefan Schubert (24:03):
Yeah, it's customer has been pretty favorable. One, there were a lot of concerns about me handing my ID card to someone else and maybe that's a big brother concern. We haven't really had any of that. That was sort of something we thought might be a problem and it wasn't a problem at all. Customers don't mind. Generally speaking, I found across both the new solutions deploying in branch and across my entire career, if the customer can complete the activity, they're usually okay with it, right? No one complains that it took me 30 seconds. If I ultimately achieve service, they complain when it doesn't work. And so we spent a lot of time focusing on when there's failures, are they real failures? Can we explain the failures? It can be tough because if you're denying someone's service, there's no fraud claim eventually, right? We're just letting you do anything. So it's hard to get truth data on what is a customer versus a fraudster experience. But where we can find deep dives, we're able to identify small improvements to make it better for the customer. And generally the feedback's been pretty positive.

Carter Pape (25:01):
Sweet.

Kerry Cantley (25:02):
If you ask a customer to do something and they do it and it works, it's great. When you ask them to do something and they do it and it doesn't work, that's where it gets very frustrating. Not only for the customer, but those that have to help service them because the technology has to be easy, simple to use, and when it works, it has to work well.

Carter Pape (25:27):
So Kerry, I'm interested to hear from you about the regulatory considerations of this. I can imagine that a treasury or OCC might like to hear that changing the way that a branch works is improving. You're catching more money laundering, you're catching more terrorism funding by doing that, and ideally that's what these changes would do. But are there other considerations that you need to make?

Kerry Cantley (25:53):
Yeah, I think regulatory compliance is foundational. It's like the baseline. I believe technology has kind of surpassed where regulation are today. We have a lot of legacy regulations. Customers don't understand the difference between reg E and reg CC, and I have this one experience in this payment method, immediate money. When I say something's fraudulent on my credit card, however, it may take me 45 days or longer if it's check fraud, they don't understand any of that. So as an industry got to comply, period, but technology surpassed that. So you almost have to bridge and understanding of there are legacy compliance rules and regulations that I have to comply with, but I've got to have a layer of customer experience that makes it easy for them so they don't have to understand the complication the banks do. And then one of the other things is understanding what is new in regulation and how to adhere to that and the complexity of that.

(26:51):
So I think that none of that is going away. Does it need to change? Probably. I think if you have the right intent and your customer experience as well and you're applying the right regs, raws and rules underneath that, you'll be in a good spot. The ultimate goal of IDV protection, some of the things we've talking about about identification, real time and prevention are all to reduce those regulatory considerations and concerns. But it's also to reduce losses, reduce customer impact, protect the good and identify the bad. Although that they have to take into place. I don't think regulatory environment's going to change. I don't think it's going to become simpler. I think it'll be more complex until maybe it's some point. There's a consolidation of payment types or ease of use across those payment types, but the consumer themselves don't understand that and it's the responsibility of the industry and technology to help support the requirements of the regulation, whether that's outputs or inputs. We've got to consider that as we maintain privacy, put the right technologies in place to anonymize that and all the things that we should be doing to make sure that that data does not get breached. So those are all important factors and this regulatory environment that we're in. But I think it is behind. I mean I think technology has surpassed where the regulations are today.

Stefan Schubert (28:22):
I would agree for sure. Some of these regs were written 20, 25 years ago. They were written by probably a lawyer, not a technologist. So they do need updating. I also agree it's unlikely that we see a broad regulatory update. A thousand percent agree on the complexity for the customer to understand this. I've been in this industry for almost two decades. There's several lawyers who helped me understand this stuff and I still don't always understand it. It's not fair to ask a customer of our bank to understand the regulations. So we need to simplify that for them. And frankly, they shouldn't even need to be aware of a regulation. They should just know this is how banks operate. Now, in an environment when the regulations might be outdated, we're just going to typically exceed them and act as if, okay, how would I regulate myself? This is what I would tell myself to do.

(29:07):
This is the most secure thing to do. I'm going to do that. And I think it is reassuring. I'm hearing from a lot of banks across the industry, just a lot of the fraud decisions are not being made based off purely p and l anymore. No one's saying it's acceptable to lose X dollars because even if that's not necessarily driving your bottom line, that's still a person who had to deal with that, especially with identity. Identity theft is so frustrating for a consumer. My mother-in-law has been an identity theft victim and she constantly gets updates about this person who has commingled with her identity like 20 years ago. So I think we're all trying to do the right thing and the more we can agree across the bank, so the right thing to do, the better for the customer.

Kerry Cantley (29:51):
Yeah, I think the industry needs to participate with the industry, right? Again, it's not the me problem, it's the we problem. And I think your customers will have a great better experience. They'll be more protected. The information sharing is important for all of that in the right way, protected and making sure you maintain privacy. But I would agree, identity theft has a higher statistically indication of suicide attempts than anything else. I mean, it's above the US basis, so it's a problem that needs to be addressed when you think about the impact it has to a person.

Carter Pape (30:31):
So just getting a little bit more picture, big picture as we wrap things up and just as a reminder, we'll have time for audience questions after this. Stefan, I'm hoping that you can just talk a little bit about the long-term vision that JP Morgan Chase has with respect to how the branch is changing. Are there any bigger goals that you're trying to achieve with that? And

Stefan Schubert (30:55):
So there's definitely people who get paid way more than me who have better opinions about this, but from my perspective, like I said earlier, fewer systems and more services. We really want our financial specialists to focus on customer advice and customer guidance more than anything else. Reiterate that we're focusing on community based branches. For me, I do multiple branch visits, a branch on the north side of the Columbus and the south side of Columbus where I'm from different experience because they're customized for where they're from. We're intentionally not taking sort of a cookie cutter model with our branches. And then since I'm very identity focused, we do see long-term value in our is being identity centers. There are people and there's a strong correlation between people who are hard to bank and people who are hard to identify, like recent immigrants, young adults, people without history. I would love for them to be able to go to a branch, prove their identity, get access to financial services, and then use that. I'm now in this system and I have access to the system. The hardest part is just getting access to the financial system in the first place, and we want our branches to be identity centers for our customers.

Carter Pape (31:58):
Before we get to key takeaways, I have the same question for you. You had a long career at Bank of America, and I'm just interested in hearing what are the things that you're trying to help financial institutions do with the technology that you're offering them?

Kerry Cantley (32:13):
Simplify. I think it's the biggest challenge that any bank credit union has today is there's a breadth of technology, legacy and new that is out there. And because systems don't necessarily talk to each other, processes are siloed, organizational focus is different, and then you take big picture industry, the challenge even gets bigger. So I think simplification while at the same time creating better ease of use across the channel experience, whether that's in online, mobile branch or any other channel, ATM, even wherever that interaction happens, making sure the technology is simple for customers to use, but also the banking operations to use because sometimes we forget there's a large operational environment that sits behind all of these processes to make 'em run every day. So we want to make it simple. We want to apply the right technology in the right places and bring all of that to bear to make it easier so that people can focus where they need to, whether that's on the customer, whether that's on a transaction, whether that's on a payment, take all of the complicated things out that they have to do every day, the manual things we heard about uses for AI, right?

(33:42):
Documentation, all of those things make it simple. I think that's a big goal. It's a big hairy goal, but it can be done if you apply the right technology the right way across processes.

Carter Pape (33:54):
Awesome. Well, I'll let you close it out if you want to share any other key takeaways.

Kerry Cantley (33:58):
Yeah, so I think we have some key takeaways on the slide. We talked a lot about in-person, customer experience at the branch and how important that is, and they will continue to be an important place for your customers period. And so making that experience customizable to their preferences is going to be very important and doing what you can to make sure that that verification process with your customer makes sense to them as well as your branch employees. Remember, employees are customers too. Traditional brick and mortars not in play anymore. It's more about the community and it's more about the services that you offer to your customer, which is the most important, right? To maintain your brand and to maintain your customers. That has to be the focus. Don't forget you need to modernize along the way. Digital technology is out there. It's amazing the innovation that's happening today in the space, especially as the financial industry changes.

(34:56):
So take that into account and look at making your processes simple and applying the right technology in the right places. And then at the end of the day, who I am and what I do is going to be important to bridge together identity. It's not just about the document anymore, it's about all of the elements of who I am, so my identity, my biometrics, but also what I do, my payments, my services, how I interact with you, how often I log on, what kind of activities do I do in those relationship activities with you that are going to be important to bridge the right friction in the right places for the customer. Because customers aren't afraid of friction if you tell them why and it makes sense.

Carter Pape (35:42):
Awesome. Well, we have time now for audience questions about nine minutes, so if you have anything that you want to ask, shout it out. I will just repeat the question on the mic so that we have it on the recording and so everyone can hear it. So any questions?

Audience Member 1 (36:02):
So early on you talked about as you want to explain your customers, what you perspective, you brought the explicit example of Hi, I checked in. Oh, hey, nice to meet you, sir. It's great to see that you're here. We know that you're perfectly checked in. That's a very simple example. Have you looked at going further and looking at studying, Hey, I see that you walked in and you logged in. That's how we know automating instead of that explicit intent, actually automating the discovery, customer walked in, we know they walked in because their phone walked in, we know their phone. Have you looked at that? Is there an UN valley kind of going too far?

Carter Pape (36:42):
So the question was about specifically the check-in experience for customers, and early on we talked about how you might present your ID or something to do that, but have you thought about moving towards something more advanced where you're detecting that their device has entered the premise?

Kerry Cantley (36:58):
I can. So there's a lot of debate between passive and active, and so where is that line? I think in my perspective, that comes down to the customer experience customization. So if you're cool with it, I'm going to passively because you understand it, you understand the technology, we understand your behaviors, we understand how you walk in the branch and if you're okay with, Hey Joe, how are you doing? I know you're here to cash that check. Come on up. Great. Some people want it, it's a little bit too passive, and they want that active understanding that says, Hey, we noticed you checked in, you're in the parking lot, come on in, whatever. And they want that interaction so they feel that trust and value. So I believe it comes down to really personal experience and that's what customers are looking for. They do a lot of research on their own, especially younger groups. They've got YouTube, they've got all these things, and so they're comfortable, but your older generations may not be. So I think it's really about making that customization at the customer experience level to understand do they active or do they like passive and how is that experience different for them? Yeah,

Stefan Schubert (38:07):
I would agree. There's some people who would really like that, and there's some people who would absolutely hate it. We've been experimenting with this long before the advent of ai. We've been experimenting with even as simple as just a note on the account that contextually tells the employee why you're there. This is really just more personal experience than it is like broad chase experience, but I think it's very helpful to start with the type of service you might need. Maybe I'm going to do some pre-work to get that ready. I'm going to pull into session the things I need to pull into session for you, but I'm going to give you a chance to explain yourself. I don't want to just assume you're there for a specific reason. Maybe your online profile is blocked, but you don't care. Maybe you're just there for something else. I don't want to try and steer you into one conversation. It's up to the customer to tell us what they want to talk about.

Kerry Cantley (38:51):
And I think community, community-based branches help that. So in New York, it's going to be one experience In a rural community where I live, my husband loves Ms. Pat, and so Ms. Pat knows my husband and he walks in and has that conversation with her. He knows they have that relationship. So I think community branch services drive some of that as well.

Stefan Schubert (39:15):
I remember visiting a branch and the customer came in and was like, I'm waiting for Joe and goes, but Bob's available right now. You can leave. You can do this thing and leave. And they're like, no, I'm going to sit and wait for Joe. And it was so alien to me. But you're right, some people that that's what they want. They know their banker and they like their banker and that's who they want to service them.

Carter Pape (39:34):
I was talking to a credit union two days ago that did a survey of their customers recently that found that they over time have been increasing their demand to see branches in their community and at the same time seeing less banking happening in their branches, more in the mobile

Kerry Cantley (39:51):
Relation, relational.

Carter Pape (39:51):
Yeah. So it is just a funny thing. Sometimes there's a mismatch between

Kerry Cantley (39:56):
Maybe a cafe. Cafe is really true?

Carter Pape (40:00):
Right, exactly, yeah.

Stefan Schubert (40:01):
I have to shoehorn this meme in. I'm sorry. It's a meme, so it's probably not the official stance of Chase, but I love this. I saw this the other day. It was about millennials, and it was like, if I'm going to make a small purchase, I'll use my phone. If it's a big purchase, like a airline ticket, I want to use my desktop for a big screen. And I extrapolate that to be, if I'm make a really big purchase, I want a person. And I did this the other day where I went into the branch, I had to deposit a check. It was a large check, and I knew I didn't need to go to the branch. I work for Chase. I know the systems. I could have gone to an ATM, but subconsciously I was like, I just want to hand this to a person. I want to feel that personal touch. And so I think that's just part of the human experience is that there's some things you just really want to trust a human being with.

Carter Pape (40:44):
All right. Any other questions?

Audience Member 2 (40:46):
Well, not a question before statement. I think the key issue is we've got a lot of in analysis, but it's the privacy trust issue. It's how close different roles. So it's a matter of trying to feeling out that process out.

Carter Pape (41:12):
Yeah, so those a comment about how far do you want to push the line so that you're between privacy and trust and how it kind of differs for each member as well. Any questions or did you want to add something?

Kerry Cantley (41:28):
No, there is a thin line there, right? Application of technology should enhance experience, not take away from it. And so I feel in the future, I would love for my bank to ask me how I want to be communicated with not how I want my push notifications. Do I like to chat with a bot? Do I like to talk to a person? Do I like my in branch experience? I think if we ask the customers, we'll get better understanding of that in order to apply technology across the board, but make it effective for everybody to use. And I think that's where actually AI could benefit at us. All right. In terms of understanding that experience, not in a scary way where I am looking at your clicks and your behavioral models, but I understand how you want to interact with me. It's happening in retail like Amazon. Amazon's like, Hey, last month you ordered a size six and a half shoe and the heel was two and a half inches. Do you want that again? And so if retail can do it, I think financial services can do a better job of that to make it very personal.

Carter Pape (42:51):
Sorry for Ineptly summarizing your eloquent comment. Yeah, that was anything to add? I think that adjusted.

Stefan Schubert (42:58):
I agree. I think visible friction is a good thing. Customers want to feel secure. I mean, look, there's a reason they have a bank and not a mattress stuff with money. They want to feel secure, and so they want to see that you're being authenticated. I love the retail example because I think that's a good example of how it can work and go wrong. Many people have gone on to Amazon and all of a sudden something they were talking about is being offered on Amazon. That's a horrible feeling. Everyone hates that. Or when real story happened to me, I'm trying to shop for a surprise gift for my wife, and she's like, it's in my suggested list now. This looks cool. Right?

(43:31):
It's like

(43:32):
Customization and personalization can go too far. We need to be mindful about, especially as banks, right? We need to be very mindful about absolutely how we treat our customers there.

Kerry Cantley (43:40):
You have money. I mean, you're financial trust is in you, so you have a higher bar and a higher standard when it comes to making sure it's me.

Carter Pape (43:51):
We have time for one more question. All right. I think we're good then. Thank you all for coming out and enjoy the rest of the conference.

Stefan Schubert (44:01):
Thank you.