Technology as the differentiator has become the driver for the Indian banking business in the past decade. Digitization is top priority for banks today as they grapple with growth and regulation issues, while battling security concerns. According to Gartner, IT spends by banks will double over the next four years on account of digitization. The IT budget of banking and securities sectors in India grew 10.6% in 2015, according to industry estimates.
Moreover, an Accenture survey 'Technology Vision for Banking 2015' said that nearly 90% bank executives believed that with the adoption of more intelligent hardware, sensors and devices, new business models will shift the focus of selling from products or services to outcomes. Banks as well as digital payments providers are investing in big data, analytics, artificial intelligence, robotic process automation, intelligent analytics and deep learning to stay ahead of the curve.
For instance, one of the top banks in India, Axis Bank is using analytics to sharpen its fraud system, risk management system, decision making ability, product offerings, and operational capabilities.
Here are some of the unique technologies used by leading banks and digital payment firms.
Biometric authentication: Many banks, now, are using this biometrics for opening a new account. This helps in avoiding complicated paper work. Most banks use Aadhar Card for customer authentication.
Artificial Intelligence: DBS Bank uses this technology for providing customer service. There is an AI-driven virtual assistant with whom customers can converse anywhere anytime to get their queries answered or conduct banking transactions. It can already anticipate and answer some 10,000 customer questions, with new knowledge added each passing day.
Budget optimiser: Many banks help customers do their budgeting, track expenses and analyse purchasing trends by providing options such as this. The function is smart enough to understand customer behaviour and preferences, synthesise data, and provide recommendations. It also studies customers’ spending patterns and prompts them if they are overspending.
OAuth + Tokenisation: Payment solutions company Citrus Pay uses OAuth for user authentication and to check whether the transaction is coming from a secured network. Tokensiation is used to avoid passing card data over public internet. Card data is replaced with a token and the token is sent from user device which is then decrypted into actual card number on the institution’s server before card number is sent for authorization.
Dynamic inbuilt security: Through this process, security is enhanced through dynamic inbuilt technology, which is safer than OTP, or the one-time password. Today, customers are used to receiving OTPs via SMS, and then typing codes into pages to authorise their mobile banking transactions. DBS Bank, for instance, offers an embedded soft token security, avoiding the need to
Data Analytics: It plays a very important role in analyzing user behavior while making a payment transaction. It provides insights into various drop off reasons and help banks and financial institutions drive user behavior for successful checkout.
Machine Learning: It is a new practice that replaces static logic with machine logic. It is the next level of data analytics and logics are updated by machine in real time unlike the process followed under the static logic practice.
OTP Read + SMS Scrapping: A new method adopted by many players that helps in improving user experience for financial transaction. When accessing one’s account from an app, it is quite painful to fetch the OTP from the phone’s inbox. This function reads the SMS from the Inbox automatically and pastes it on device screen for approval.
