The NICE-Cisco collaboration will accelerate the growing trend of rolling out advanced applications for retail banking, based on a converged voice and video IP infrastructure. This provides major potential for synergies between physical security and in-branch marketing, and offers the central office a real-time 360-degree view of every branch’s operations and customers. This collaboration supports a trend is observed in Datamonitor’s report, ‘Network synergies in branch renewal’. Daniel Lessner, Financial Services Technology Analyst at Datamonitor, comments “A more united approach to branch renewal could graduate functions such as video surveillance from their traditional position as pure cost centers to adding value back into the business. For example, CCTV footage of branches could be used to analyze branch utilization or customer service levels in real time.” The NICE contribution is based on the company’s solutions for extracting insights from interactions through advanced content analytics that improve business and operational performance as well as enhancing security. The offering extends across three major areas of retail banking – security, marketing and operations – and across every touch point, including the teller’s counter and the ATM. The NICE offering is driven by the company’s solution portfolio of voice and video content analytics, which provides insights into customer interactions across three major areas: Security: video-based insights include access and intrusion detection and abandoned baggage detection. Operations: voice and video-based insights such as queue control and reduction and customer movement. Marketing: voice and text-based insights into branch optimization, advertising, promotion and promotional effectiveness, cross-selling/up-selling, screen/billboard positioning, and competitor information. Jordi Ferrer, Retail Banking Business Development Manager, Cisco Systems Europe, Middle East and Africa explains the bigger picture. “Retail banks are placing new emphasis on delivering adequate products and services through the most appropriate channels whilst cementing customer relationships. A single view of customer interactions and behaviors is a key factor in achieving a multichannel vision”. “Together Cisco Systems and NICE deliver the insight needed to gain maximum profit from the retail banking branches of the future, while delivering truly cohesive, consistent multi-channel customer service and security to their customers,” comments Koby Huberman, Corporate Vice President, Business Development and Strategic Alliances at NICE. “Bringing voice and video onto a common IP network offers major potential in everything from physical security to in-branch-marketing, and enables retail banks to extract the maximum value from of their investments.”
