Customers can easily transfer banking partners due to the intense competition in the market. Banks can lower customer attrition by using data and analysis of their clients’ financial information to inform tailored products and solutions. However, the need for financial services to be more individualized doesn’t end there.
Banks must have a greater understanding of the lifestyles of their customers in order to provide deeper levels of customisation. Lifestyle data acknowledges people’s ways of living and can assist banks in identifying the key factors that influence their purchases, such as age and income. Financial organizations can also take into account the interests, activities, and impact of lifestyle data on consumers’ purchasing decisions.
For example, throughout the week, people in college towns often dine out at pizza joints and fast-food restaurants. Bedding, bathroom, and culinary supplies are typically in high demand when a large number of college students move to the area. Then, throughout college semesters, lifestyle measurements reveal clear growth trends in local nightlife and music establishments.
Kelly Harlin, Director of Solutions Marketing and Commercialization at Sharp NEC, recently appeared on the AI in Business podcast with Daniel Faggella, CEO and Head of Research at Emerj. Information displays and camera systems for collecting data from real-world settings are Sharp NEC’s areas of expertise. They are at the forefront of banks’ requests for additional information from their physical branches because of these capabilities.
In the research that follows, we look at two significant revelations that Kelly makes from the banking industry:
Gathering consumer lifestyle data: Using computer vision to track banking information on consumer purchases and lifestyles in order to tailor customer offerings.
Providing bank branches with digital-first experiences: Maximizing the value of physical branches in a digital-first era by using analytics to determine why clients are visiting banks after the pandemic.
Gathering Lifestyle Information From Customers
Banks now have a wealth of information on their clients’ finances, but they are also interested in learning more about their lifestyles. They require additional information regarding the following:
Which vehicles do they drive?
What attire do they don?
Where do they reside?
When they enter the branch, what do they need?
How long did they have to wait in line to use the drive-thru or the ATM?
However, how does the bank benefit even after they get the data? Kelly explains to Emerj how banks can determine lifestyle factors that are important for financial decision-making as the banking industry becomes more data-rich with client financial information:
“Banks can provide better customer service by knowing the lifestyle and possible financial situation of the people who live close to their bank or credit union branch. The banks shouldn’t advertise or encourage luxury auto loans in that area if the data showed that many high-end vehicles were passing through the cameras.
- Kelly Harlin, Director of Solutions Marketing and Commercialization at Sharp NEC
She stresses that getting to know your clients beyond their financial situation might reveal their brand preferences and what they are yearning for.
This implies that banks are using their physical branches’ whole assets as data collection facilities. When a retail bank has a physical branch, an ATM, and a sizable parking lot all in one location, it must consider two key factors: the customer and their vehicle. The information that the banks are attempting to gather is:
Data on customers’ lifestyles based on their clothing choices and logos
Which vehicles do they drive—luxury cars or SUVs?
Banks can use data collected by cameras and small detecting devices both inside and outside of their branches to help them develop and customize their offerings. In this situation, banks benefit from AI’s computer vision area.
Kelly guarantees that doing so won’t violate the privacy of the clients. For example, if the private sector complies with the policy framework, the Canadian government permits them to record their clients. The standards require companies to have a purpose for using video surveillance and to utilize it exclusively for that purpose. Additionally, it requests that they create a policy regarding the use of video surveillance.
The way the government requests that businesses get ready is what distinguishes the rules. Specifically, by making companies respond to inquiries from the general public. People are entitled to know who is observing them, why, what data is being collected, and what happens to photos that are being recorded.
According to Kelly, hardware configurations can be flexible in these circumstances, so banks can use their current security cameras to achieve the same goals. The important thing is how the data is collected and processed, Kelly told Emerj. The following should be part of the hardware’s fundamental structure:
The branch cameras are used to gather visual data, and Raspberry Pis can be used to leverage more cameras.
Multiple camera feeds can be installed and shown cable-free on a single dashboard or data collection source thanks to the Intel Smart Display Module (SDM), which receives the video streams.
The bank then collects data for their own dashboard by sending the data and associated aggregations via APIs to a database in a data lake.
The use case determines the kind of hardware that must be installed where. The current security cameras serve the bank’s objective if all it wants to do is record traffic coming from outside the branch. However, Kelly advises utilizing Logitech cameras for a use case where the bank needs to recognize the brand.
A bank would require analytics software in addition to security cameras in order to collect data on consumer attributes such as the number of individuals, logo detection, wait times, vehicle classification, apparel detection, and object color detection.
Providing Bank Branches With Digital-First Experiences:
Given that two-thirds of individuals globally make or receive digital payments in the wake of the pandemic, how can banks get customers back into their branches and what services should they provide?
According to Kelly, credit unions have adapted to the shift and are hoping to get members back to their physical locations. In order to provide customers with value when they visit the branch, they thus wish to learn as much as possible about them.
Individuals have become accustomed to a balance between their digital and physical experiences. Prior to the epidemic, there wasn’t much that physical bank branches could offer to complement or even give digital experiences.
Banks are now faced with the problem of providing physical experiences that go hand in hand with the digital-first strategy that the majority of their clients are taking to their financial interactions.
During her presentation on the AI in Business podcast, Kelly outlines one data-driven strategy for resolving the aforementioned problem. Banks may anticipate why consumers are visiting their physical branches in the first place by collecting and analyzing sufficient data in advance, whether it be a card issue or a loan for a home, company, or automobile.
A portion of this entails viewing what appear to be obstacles, such as long lineups, as chances—or rather, ways to learn about the lifestyles of your customers. Kelly informs Emerj that waiting in line to see the loan officers when consumers visit the branch might be viewed as being extremely ineffective for both the customer and the branch. Kelly provides an intriguing use case to address this:
An interactive screen was installed in the bank branch by one of the lenders. Customers would now engage with the content on the screen rather than merely waiting, and the bank could collect other crucial information like the brand they are wearing while they did so.
- Kelly Harlin, Director of Solutions Marketing and Commercialization at Sharp NEC
Kelly goes on to discuss how banks might make innovative use of these information-gathering displays. Customers can access account information from the same interactive screen as they wait to speak with the loan officer.
In a different scenario, a person searching for a car loan might have certain inquiries that the computer screen could address. Even a loan for a recreational vehicle (Kelly uses the example of a customer taking out a loan for a boat) can be performed online, negating the need for a human person to assist with customer service.
Lastly, a management dashboard can be used to make decisions based on deeper trends seen in the lifestyle data collected by camera systems from the actual branch waiting area as well as the customers’ private information that was discreetly submitted via a waiting line interface screen.