By: Richard Harris
We debuted the latest concepts from our Incubation Lab – and came home inspired by the trends we saw.
Our Innovation Team is home after another whirlwind trip to the massive payments conference, Money20/20. We spent the months prior to the show working in our lab, as well as in the labs of our collaborative partners, to fine-tune our latest concepts. In particular, we focused on some of the most popular elements from a “bank of the future” our team created for last year’s show, called the Responsive Banking Concept (RBC).
This time around, we pushed even further to innovate on historic pain points at the ATM: access, authentication, security and reliability. We came up with Janus and Irving.
Visitors to our booth at Money20/20 were intrigued by the conceptual technology we were showcasing – in particular, the improved user-experience (UX) features on Janus, and the biometric eye-scanning capabilities incorporated into Irving.
I spent three days straight demoing, talking and listening to a wide range of people across the payments industry, and I saw a few themes emerge:
- Security is a big concern – and our contactless solutions address that challenge. We found that everyone was really intrigued by the possibilities of the iris scanner, for a few reasons. First, eye-scanning authentication takes the place of the typical card and PIN process, which eliminates the opportunity for card skimming and PIN capture. Additionally, the experience happens much more quickly, meaning consumers aren’t spending long periods of time in front of an ATM handling cash or conducting transactions. I demoed the eye-scan technology for The Today Show during the conference, and reporter Craig Melvin made security the primary focus of his story.
- Consumers want ease and flexibility. People were wowed by the interactivity we implemented into Janus; it features an oversized tablet-style touch screen with prompts and visual aids designed to lead you more intuitively through a transaction – even a complex one. When NFC World’s Rian Boden discovered Irving in our booth, she was most interested in the range of contactless options we packed into the compact terminal. She outlined the NFC, QR and eye-scanning options in a recent article about her experience.
- Mobile, digital and emergent technologies are becoming the norm, not the outlier. We had some very interesting conversations at the show. We talked with people from places like Amazon – people who might not traditionally think about how an endpoint like an ATM could be relevant in their world – and discovered we shared some common ground in our efforts to orchestrate channels and consumer experiences. We talked with outlets like the Wall Street Journal, which penned a write-up that focused on how large companies are beginning to embrace technology (including our eye-scanner) that seemed like “sci-fi” just a few years ago.
The most encouraging thing for me as an engineer and designer was to see the gears beginning to turn in people’s heads as they explored our concepts and got engaged in conversations with our team. We’re not just thinking about mobile banking, or the so-called “ATM of the future” when we work on these kinds of new concepts. Instead, we’re thinking about the whole mobile self-service experience, what that means for the future of retail banking and user experience, and how we can strategically prepare both our clients and their consumers for the radically shifting retail landscape.
Plus, at the end of the day, we get to play around with some pretty cool technology.
