You’ll soon be doing your banking on Facebook, but maybe not in the way that you think.
Earlier this week, Sprinklr’s Ragy Thomas pointed to a future where bank transactional experiences would be embedded into social media experiences. If that seems implausible to you, it’s time to adjust your expectations. Infosys will be releasing a product very much like this in February 2014 — in markets outside the United States.
Presented as part of the Innovation Showcase at BAI Retail Delivery in Denver on Tuesday, a new product called Offers and Catalog from Infosys presents targeted offers for financial products in a social media environment. In the example presented this week, the user clicks on an offer for a savings account that appears in her Facebook feed, and is taken to a special landing page for that offer.
The offer page has been styled to look like a page on Amazon, down to similar products and even, amazingly, reviews. The user can read what other consumers of the product think, and can compare it to similar items — other products at the bank. If the consumer wants help, live chat, audio chat and video chat are all available.
The product is then added to the user’s cart. The application process which follows is brief. The user can port over data from her Facebook or other social media account to populate many of the fields in the application, then complete the rest and return to her Facebook browsing. This experience is designed to work in any channel, and is simple for the banker to set up on the backend.
“The experience is designed to feel both fresh and familiar,” said Rajashekara Maiya, the principal for product strategy at Finacle — and it does. The importance of the social media tie-in cannot be overstated. In the Asian markets where this product will launch in February, the population is far younger than in the US and Europe, and mobile phone and social media use are near-universal.
Most countries in the region also lack an extensive branch network, and this weakness of years past has become a strength. Financial applications can be built for the mobile phone and there is little legacy infrastructure to put a drag on innovation.
Infosys is looking to expand its operations in the United States. Its Finacle core banking platform already operates in 81 countries. Finacle’s global head Haragopal Mangipudi explained the company’s basic strategy for growth to Bank Innovation. “Fortify the back end, differentiate on the front end.” Offers and Catalog is differentiated all right. The product needs to go through its paces in Asia before coming to the US — we’ll be waiting.
Infosys has a market cap of approximately $30 billion and is headquartered in Bangalore, India.