Survey Highlights Gaps in Current Applications and Strong Interest in Banking Virtual Assistants
New York, June 1, 2015 — Kasisto, creators of artificial intelligence-driven virtual specialist technology for financial institutions, today released results from a recent survey that illustrates evolving behaviors in mobile banking and consumer banking preferences, as well as a strong need for banks to leverage their mobile channels more.
The survey, conducted as an independent study project by Wharton MBA students under the supervision of the Marketing faculty and with the support ofWharton FinTech, indicates that mobile banking is a much underutilized channel for addressing consumers’ financial needs. Mobile banking is frequently used, but primarily to perform basic and rudimentary tasks, such as checking balances and depositing checks. Consumers still turn to online banking portals, physical bank branches and banking call-centers for assistance when queries become more complicated, including searching for transactions, researching new products or disputing charges.
“We were surprised to discover how underutilized the mobile banking channel remains today,” said Abhay Nayak, a recent Wharton MBA graduate and Wharton FinTech member who conducted the survey. “Consumers, especially younger generations, increasingly use mobile banking apps for simple daily tasks. To us, the results clearly indicate that a better and richer mobile banking experience is needed to support complex-use cases.”
The survey also explored banking consumers’ attitudes towards Kasisto and interest in leveraging new conversational artificial intelligence technology to assist in routine, as well as complex banking needs. Kasisto’s platform seamlessly integrates with a bank’s mobile app, allowing users to have human-like conversational interactions through voice, touch or text, making it easier to access financial information and perform complex transactions.
When presented with the option of adding a conversational personal assistant to their mobile banking app, 75 percent of respondents said they would use the app more frequently and 79 percent said they would leverage the added technical functionality to support more complicated inquiries, thus relying less on more costly channels.
“The rise of virtual personal assistants has changed consumers’ expectations for how they interact with mobile devices, and there is a clear opportunity for banks to use conversational artificial intelligence to extend feature sets and simplify usability within their mobile apps,” said Zor Gorelov, Co-Founder and CEO of Kasisto. “Kasisto’s technology is poised to redefine how consumers interact with their banks and aid in closing the mobile app usability gap that costs banks nearly $2 billion each year.”
Other top findings from the survey include:
- Mobile banking is the least utilized banking channel, with only 64 percent penetration.
- Of those who do use mobile banking, frequency of use is high, with 59 percent using the channel more than four times a month.
- Checking account balance is the most common activity performed on mobile. Those that use this channel check balances with a median frequency of 6-10 times per month.
- The age group that frequents mobile platforms most often is 18-30 year olds, with 49 percent of this demographic accessing a mobile bank app more than 6 times a month.
The survey was sent to a panel of 1,069 mobile bankers, of which 369 completed the survey. The panel was a representative sample of the U.S. mobile banking population compiled by Qualtrics, a private market research company. In addition to being asked about their satisfaction with retail and mobile banking platforms today, panelists were shown a one minute demonstration of Kasisto’s personal assistant functionality and asked to share their interest in the technology.
To view the full findings of the study, please visit www.kasisto.com//survey/ . To learn more about Kasisto, please visit www.kasisto.com/ .
About Kasisto
Kasisto, Inc. offers conversational artificial intelligence technology through branded virtual personal specialists to dramatically improve usability of enterprise mobile applications. Kasisto’s conversational platform offers a comprehensive technology stack including speech recognition, natural language understanding and generation, and artificial intelligence reasoning. Kasisto’s user interface provides multi-modal capabilities that let consumers easily and quickly access information and perform simple and complex tasks using voice, text or touch on their smart devices. The company leverages decades of research and development in artificial intelligence by SRI International.
About The Wharton School at The University of Pennsylvania
The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania—founded in 1881 as the first collegiate business school—is recognized globally for intellectual leadership and ongoing innovation across every major discipline of business education. The most comprehensive source of business knowledge in the world, Wharton bridges research and practice through its broad engagement with the global business community. The School has 5,000 undergraduate, MBA, executive MBA, and doctoral students; more than 9,000 annual participants in executive education programs; and an alumni network of 93,000 graduates.
About Wharton FinTech
Wharton FinTech is the first student-led FinTech initiative and is dedicated to connecting innovators, academics and investors with the ideas and companies that are reinventing global financial services. Wharton FinTech is committed to education, career development and idea promotion by connecting innovative, established, disruptive and proven FinTech enterprises with students and industry professionals. For more information, visit www.whartonfintech.org
