Future of banking: A metaverse bank, on your browser soon

Sometime soon when you log on to your bank’s website, don’t be surprised if you are welcomed by an avatar of your branch manager. Indian banks are gearing up to join the metaverse bandwagon. Easiofy Solutions, which builds web-based AR-solutions, recently gave a product demo at the Chief Information Security Officers (CISO) meet at the Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technology (IDRBT).

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“The response was good and we got a lot of feedback. The Hindi and Gujarati speaking avatars who looked like bank employees and could handhold people in doing banking transactions was a new perspective to the whole banking metaverse,” says Noor Fatma, co-founder and CTO, Easiofy Solutions. “Currently, we are doing a proof of concept with Indian Overseas Bank which we would be showcasing at a 5G event for bank CTOs. Now we have incorporated voice biometrics as an added authentication feature which would further answer concerns about security of the system.”

While validating its AR/VR platform, Easiofy had developed a virtual bank walkthrough. Also, it had been working on human holograms, training them using AI for the gestures. As the virtual bank was ready, IDBRT’s domain expert suggested using avatars to guide customers in the virtual bank through conversations. So, when you visit the virtual bank, you are greeted with a reception meta avatar dressed in a salwar kameez, who does a namaskar and guides you to the appropriate counters. If you want to check your account balance, there is a savings counter meta avatar who takes in your info, verifies whether it is really you and tells you your balance.

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Given that not every customer can be expected to have fancy VR headsets to visit a virtual bank, Easiofy has made a browser based banking metaverse. You just need a link to visit it on your phones, tablets, VR headsets or desktops. “The first use cases we are trying to achieve are those most frequently used: checking balance, making a transaction, getting information on loans, educating the customer. We will keep implementing the existing use cases as offered by digital banking as well as physical banking,” says Fatma. “The animations and mannerisms of the avatar are improving every day as we get more feedback,” she says.

Multilingual speech functionality was a major task. So it integrated Reverie Language Technologies’ voice suite which comprises Speech-to-Text (STT), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Text to Speech (TTS) into its virtual banks. Explains Chintan Parekh, technical lead – Speech R&D, Reverie Language Technologies, “When you interact with a multilingual voice bot, you are speaking to the bot and hearing from the bot. But when you are interacting with a multilingual avatar, it’s a completely different experience since you are also looking at the avatar when it’s speaking. So, the movements when the avatar is speaking and when it is listening have to be realistic. For lip sync with the content being spoken, along with the speech, our TTS engine sends Viseme events. Viseme is similar to phoneme in spoken language. Using the Viseme events, the mouth movements of the avatar are controlled.” As of now, Easiofy’s banking avatars speak in 22 languages.

Easiofy has raised a MEITY TIDE seed fund through AIC, Banasthali. Capgemini has funded its research into volumetric videos and holograms in its 5G lab. It is now working on monetising its metaverse bank.