Paying with your eyes and voice: is it necessary to look back anytime?

Next year will mark ten years since Oschadbank and MasterCard launched contactless payment with bank cards in the Kyiv subway.

Now we are used to it, but at the time of the opening, this innovation caused a real sensation, even at the global level.

Our joint development was even mentioned at conferences by Google developers - Kyiv was among the five cities on the planet where this convenient technology was implemented. For many leading megacities, it is still unfeasible.

I think of this every time I stand in front of a ticket vending machine abroad and try to solve the quest of which of the dozens of ticket options I need to buy.

These ten years have flown by very quickly. Nowadays, paying with a bank card in the subway and other transportation is taken for granted. Changes continue: the key banking product, the physical card, is gradually becoming a thing of the past.

The trend of recent years has been payment with NFC gadgets, primarily phones. In Ukraine, the number of such payments exceeds 60% of all contactless payments. By the way, Ukraine is one of the ten countries in the world where NFC payments are most common.

What's next for us? Further simplification of payment technologies. In my opinion, the time when we won't have to carry our phones is not so far away. New technologies will emerge that will turn all gadgets into miniature devices that will eventually be embedded in humans.

Paying with your eyes or voice is no longer a fragment of science fiction, but a concrete development that is gradually being implemented. Another trend is the impact of artificial intelligence on financial technologies. In some banks, it satisfies more than 70% of requests to contact centers and replaces hundreds of operators.

AI also effectively helps to counteract financial fraud in the financial sector. However, no robot can prevent criminals in cyberspace without the care and caution of money owners.

Digitalization makes financial services more convenient and cheaper. It allows more people to access banking services regardless of where they live. The inclusiveness of banking services is based on online services.

One of the areas is remote onboarding, which means opening an account without visiting a branch. Previously, this seemed impossible. This is especially important in Ukraine, where the movement of people can be a problem for objective reasons.

Thanks to this service, military personnel, people abroad, mothers with small children - anyone who finds it difficult to get to a branch - can become bank customers.

By the way, digital onboarding is where Ukrainian banks compare favorably with most foreign banks. There are many stories on social media about the weeks and months that our refugees abroad have to spend opening bank accounts, even if they physically visit branches.

The development of digital services is a priority for all banks. At the same time, rapid, irreversible changes in favor of digital can harm inclusion. Progress is progress, but all signs of physical banking should not disappear. Why?

Once upon a time, there was an opinion: “Everything will be television!”. It was believed that theater and cinema would become a thing of the past, replaced by television. This did not happen. It's easy to realize this when you try to buy a ticket to see The Witch of Konotop at the Franko Theater in Kyiv.

Television is being replaced by streaming platforms, where the viewer is in control of the contact, not the person who makes the program for the week. Progress has not gone the way it was supposed to. Some “rudiments” have remained because people still need them.

One more observation. Sweden is considered to be the most advanced country in terms of abandoning cash, gradually moving towards a cashless society. Thus, in 2023, the amount of physical money in circulation in this country decreased by 10%.

However, the Swedes were not happy about this. About 44% of people have a negative attitude to the decline in the use of cash, compared to 36% in 2022. There is only one company in the whole of Sweden that provides cash collection services for points of sale.

This is a cause for concern. The local banking regulator is calling for legislation that would require banks to work with physical money, as there are people who find it difficult to use digital technology.

People still want to communicate with other people, not just AI-powered voice robots. I can testify to this as a top manager of a bank that is the leader in terms of the number of bank branches.

During the great war, the National Bank recommended that state-owned banks do not reduce the number of institutions, in order to maintain physical access to banking services. Prior to the full-scale invasion, there were no such recommendations and a systematic reduction in the number of branches was taking place.

The war forced us to look at this issue in a slightly different way. After all, there are complex banking products that require direct communication between a customer and a bank employee. For example, a mortgage.

When implementing various fintech innovations, banks should not forget about common sense. A rhetorical question: is there a need for a pizza ordering function in a banking mobile app? In my opinion, no. In the pursuit of fashion, some banks add unnecessary and sometimes even dangerous features to their mobile solutions.

Experts say that unnecessary features include complicated mechanisms for calculating income and expenses, gamification, integration with social networks, template recommendations instead of personalized advice, and payment automation that is difficult to disable.

Financial apps that use voice assistants can be dangerous. There may be accidental activation of commands and their incorrect recognition, as well as security and privacy issues.

Inclusion is a complex and long journey designed to create equal opportunities for all Ukrainians regardless of physical condition, place of residence, or gender. In order to implement barrier-free access, new directions need to be developed and progress needs to be promoted. At the same time, while moving forward quickly, we must not forget to look back.

Source: https://www.epravda.com.ua/columns/2024/09/19/719498/