The future of retail banking with Microsoft Surface
Microsoft Surface is getting a big facelift with the commercial launch of the 2.0 version developed in collaboration with Samsung. Here is a quick listing of what's new. We at Infosys having worked with customers in the past on the earlier Surface platform are all excited about this. Especially the thinner design that supports vertically mounting and the lower cost of this new version expands the scope of potential business applications. One particular domain that is showing much promise is retail banking.
Microsoft Surface can help generate customer interest in financial products, increase sales and reduce processing cycle time. We are exploring Surface being used at retail banking branches both as a self-service kiosk as well as a discussion tool for customers with banking sales representatives. The bank can issue credit or debit cards featuring identity tags using which customers can identify themselves by placing these on the Surface table. Alternatively identification can be achieved by placing their cell-phones, which might need a preinstalled application that communicates with Surface via Bluetooth. Similarly banking sales representatives can have identity cards with these tags to identify themselves and manage information using Surface.
Banks have already started taking steps towards adopting Microsoft Surface. Deutsche Bank has been leveraging Microsoft Surface as a customer advisory tool at its futuristic bank branch at Berlin. The Royal Bank of Canada is using Surface as a tool to attract new customers (among other uses) where tagged brochures are mailed to potential customers to encourage them to visit the branch, place the brochure on the surface and if they are lucky, win a prize. Barclays bank at London has been using Microsoft Service for interactively displaying benefits of their products and is targeted towards existing and potential premier customers. Given these trends, it appears that adoption of Microsoft Surface by retail banking branches is set to steadily increase in the days to come. There is much competition between banks nowadays and Microsoft Surface can be a differentiator to attract more customers.
Comments
Sounds MS Surface can be a great marketing tool. Interestingly, iPad's are also starting to play in the same space (cool-factor and WoW the customer). What would be really interesting to read? A compare and contrast of MS Surface vs. iPads!
Posted by: Mohan | March 8, 2012 8:27 PM