A robot welcomes customers to the bank of the future
In a week of Brics and bricks, Sandton City is no place to find peace and quiet. What with the clamour surrounding world leaders at the Brics conference and of Lego bricks being assembled at the launch of the brand’s first store in South Africa, crowds are everywhere.
Little wonder, then, that a symbol of a small revolution in banking goes almost unnoticed. At the entrance to the Nedbank branch upstairs from the Lego store, a robot stands in the entrance. Going by the name of Pepper, it is already a familiar face in fast-food restaurants and bank branches in Japan.
Nedbank brought Pepper to South Africa in February, and spent the next four months testing, customising, demonstrating and showing it off. This month, it became the bank’s digital ambassador, rotating between branches.
Its repertoire is limited to a menu of options related to the bank’s primary offerings, including borrowing, saving, insurance and investment. Oh, and it can also dance, to The Locomotion.
The song is appropriate, as Pepper symbolises the extent to which banks are moving into the future, experimenting with new interfaces. The intention is not to replace humans, though. Rather, it is to supplement their role, and is largely symbolic of the bank’s intentions.
“Client experience is extremely important in building a relationship with customers; we could never replace the engagement of the human element,” says Fabio Mione, head of projects and strategic execution for integrated channels at Nedbank. “Pepper is recognition that, if we are going to position Nedbank as a digital bank that will enhance self-service options, we have to embrace technology.”
Mione points out that, technically, Pepper is not the first robot at Nedbank. It falls into a discipline called robotic process automation, or RPA, which usually takes place behind the scenes.
“RPA has been going on for a good number of years in the bank, from chatbots in the online and contact centre environment, right through to workflow management, leveraging artificial intelligence and robotics both to improve services to clients and our own operating efficiencies.”
By the end of the year, says Mione, there will be about 200 such RPA bots functioning unobtrusively at the customer interface. “Those are invisible, unless you specifically engage with a chatbot. You wouldn’t even know in most cases that your requests are being dealt with by a bot and not a person.”
Not far from Sandton, at The Zone in Rosebank, rival bank Absa is about to show off its own ambitions to reinvent banking. Fresh from launching its new visual identity as it separated from Barclays, it will now unveil another form of bot banking: Absa ChatBanking on WhatsApp.
The venue will be the new Absa Experience outlet, described as “a space designed to move beyond a bank branch where we spark conversations and explore new ways of interacting with the next generation of Absa customers”.
These ways will probably not be as sexy as Pepper, but, as with Nedbank’s invisible bots, they will probably have a more lasting impact on the customer.
This month, Pepper became the bank’s roving digital ambassador
Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Twitter @art2gee and on YouTube.