Voice-enabled assistants are the newest buzz among consumers across industries with Google, Amazon, Apple, and other giants rolling out AI-infused gears functioning primarily through conversational voice interfaces. Globally, the number of customers using voice-assistants is increasing with a CAGR of 29.4% and is estimated to reach 1.83 billion by 2021. Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant have all become an integral part of a millennial’s day. From setting up reminders, checking the weather, to shopping – these voice-enabled digital assistants have covered most of the bases heavily influencing the mobile-tech experience.
Financial services have been one of the biggest beneficiaries of such innovations around mobile tech and IoT. Clearly, voice-first devices are the next big frontier in the global financial services space. What initially started off as a means of engaging with the customers and answering their queries has expanded beyond mere customer service to transactional banking and payment services. Banks are now looking at these voice-assistants to deliver personalized services to their customers who can use them with just their voice.
The dynamically changing needs of customers who want their banking & payment experience to be as seamless as messaging, the structural evolution of conversational AI, a growing adoption of voice-enabled personal assistants and a sudden uptake in conversational commerce are some of the major stepping stones for the evolution of voice-payments ecosystem. The adoption has already begun significantly as an estimated 8%-10% of US customers have used a form of voice payment at least once.
The biggest promise of voice FinTech comes around personalization. Voice is a tremendously rich, raw, and unstructured source of customer data, harnessing which can present valuable insights around customer behavior and needs. Also, most of these tech giants active in
