An interactive front-office banking kiosk is being rolled out by IBM to allow retail bank customers
to communicate and interact with a virtual teller, who is based at a central location, enabling banks
to reduce staff numbers at remote branch locations
The kiosk, developed by IBM’s Bari research laboratory in Italy and currently under review at a number of
Italian institutions, can also be deployed at peak hours to support busy local branch operations or at specialists events, such as music festivals. Customers see the teller on a TV display and can access account information, discuss financial plans, such as pensions and the like, and authorise credit transfers, via the communications link.
Most retail banking operations can be supported by the kiosk. For example, paper documents and cheques can be delivered and received by the virtual teller – and witnessed by the customer – thanks to the telecoms and software systems that are built into the kiosk, such as Cisco’s CallManager, Lotus Expeditor, Sametime Connect and java-based software. The system is built around IBM’s existing Anyplace kiosk. According to the manufacturers, it can also support bank’s Customer Relationship Management systems, enabling a comprehensive view of any customer accessing the remote service.
• IBM is also updating its Tivoli Federated Identity Manager software for retail banking or insurance operations so that it now
includes open standards, such as WS-Security and the Security Assertion Markup Language, which is an XML-based standard for exchanging authentication and authorisation data. According to the manufacturers, the new release is also compatible with leading vendor software frameworks, such as OpenID, as used by Microsoft Windows CardSpace, among others. The interoperable drive, which stretches to include an ‘SOA Identity Service’, is intended to help financial institutions share customer data more easily and speed up operations by eliminating the need to continually perform security checks.
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