U.S. Bank Peers into the Future for Its Mobile Tech

U.S. Bancorp's (USB) strategy for mobile is to predict the future and to get there ahead of everyone else.

The Minneapolis bank is not afraid to go it alone — or almost alone — in designing new mobile tools. The best way to meet a need is through anticipation rather than response, it says.

To this end, U.S. Bank is testing a mobile application that uses augmented reality, a technology more commonly seen in restaurant-review apps and video games than in banking. It also uses digital watermarks to tie multimedia content to printed reports through the use of a smartphone app.

Without a preset market of consumers or latent demand, the bank relies on a variety of research methods, such as considering how its consumers are using existing technology and how new technology is being embraced outside banking. It also spots shortcomings with existing systems that can be easily improved by new innovation with minimal disruption to the user.

"With a lot of this stuff, we didn't have a customer come up to us and say, 'We want to do these things,' " says Dominic Venturo, chief innovation officer of the $340 billion-asset bank. "With the augmented reality, we saw that it was harder to work in an urban environment [with traditional mapping technology], and we were looking for a way to improve that."

With augmented reality, the phone displays location data over an image of the street captured in real time through the phone's camera. Instead of getting an abstract map view when looking for branch or ATM locations, the user sees a much more visually interesting representation of the information.

This helps users navigate in cities, where a branch could be hidden in a cluster of buildings and harder to discern on a traditional map.

"If you overlay a visual field and are looking through an actual camera and can see the ATM or other location off on the horizon, it's much more intuitive and easier to use," he says.

In many cases, the tools for that improvement are already available and are already being adopted, just not for banking. Digital watermarks aren't new — in the form of quick-response "QR" codes, they're being used by magazines and other publishers to tie video and other visual content to print via a method that's less invasive from a design perspective. Augmented reality also isn't a brand-new technology. It is built into the latest handheld game consoles from Sony and Nintendo, and many iPhone apps (including one from PNC Financial Services Group) use it for games or to provide information.

"We looked for ways to apply that to locations or ATMs or merchant offers of things like that because augmented reality is an easier way to find them," he says. "We tend to see new technology earlier than you would look for commercial adoption, we're trying to solve customer problems proactively … being early in and of itself isn't always the goal."

U.S. Bank is the only major financial institution using digital watermarks to add another dimension to printed materials.

It uses digital watermarks with its internal reports. The bank has partnered with Digimarc Discover Online Services Portal to embed watermarks, or codes that can be detected by smartphone cameras to launch related applications. These applications can include videos, Webinars, charts and photos. To access the content, users with an iPhone or Android device download a free app from iTunes or Google Play. The digital content can change as marketing programs and other initiatives are updated throughout the year, making the corporate reports more agile. "We think the digital watermarks are cleaner, and it's easy to use for the [end] user," Venturo says. The bank is still considering specific consumer uses for digital watermarks. "You could link to a product from a brochure, where there may be a demo, for example," he says.

Given the lack of specific consumer demand, testing takes a substantial role as technology such as augmented reality gets an early use for banking. "We're tracking human use and getting images. We'll get a large amount of feedback and will figure out things that we need to change before the broader deployment," Venturo says.

While U.S. Bank is alone in its use of digital watermarks, it does have limited company among other banks in adopting augmented reality. PNC is using it to help consumers find automated teller machines and branches; and Halifax, a division of Lloyds, has introduced a home finder mobile app that allows people to view and pull data on houses for sale as they pass them on the street.

At PNC, there wasn't a flood of consumers demanding augmented reality, says Tom Trebilcock, the bank's vice president of e-business and payments.

"Customers weren't asking for it," he said in an earlier interview with Bank Technology News. "We have traditional ATM and branch locators baked into our mobile banking apps. Augmented reality is more of a showcase of what mobile technology can permit."

It also has promotional value for the bank. "It gives PNC a chance to show that we are a tech leader, so we were trying to develop something that's meant to be a little fun and not necessarily connected to hardcore banking," he said.

And similar to U.S. Bank, PNC found inspiration to try augmented reality from the technology's popularity outside of financial services. "The genesis of the augmented reality ATM finder came from the gaming area," he said. "PNC is interested in younger demographics as part of our virtual wallet product, and gaming is popular in that segment. If you are familiar with gaming, a lot of it is done in a first-person perspective — that is, people directly engage the content personally."