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Is your bank tracking your movements?
And what other techie tricks have they got up their sleeves to get to know you better?

By Jo Best

Published: Wednesday 13 April 2005

From virtual paper to RFID chips that track your movements around a branch, banks now have a more exotic array of technology designed to help them get to know customers better - and sell them even more services.

Accenture is touting the use of RFID in banking leaflets and credit cards to customers in and around a branch as one potential way of allowing banks to find out more about their customers' financial habits and identify areas of possible interest.

Adding tracking chips to banking brochures and burying RFID sensors within the walls of the branch itself would allow banks to identify which customers are interested in mortgages and enable the bank to target screen advertising accordingly when a customer walks past, with the movement of the tag past the screen sensor programmed to trigger a relevant advertisement, for example, the consultancy believes.

As well as chipping paper, banks also have their eye on plastic. Accenture is in talks with one US financial institution over adding the chips to bank cards, Emmanuel Viale, manager at Accenture Labs in France, revealed. Another bank in the French region of Champagne has already tried the 'smart advertising' approach.

While the phenomenon is not exactly new - RFID chips have already debuted in financial transactions in both the US and Europe - adding the tracking technology to bank cards and linking banking behaviour explicitly with customers raises obvious privacy issues.

These, according to Viale, can be overcome as long as customers are convinced they're getting a good deal.

"It's very intrusive technology, however it has to be a service... the customer has to be aware that they're carrying RFID and that someone in the branch may know he's there," he said. "It has to provide value [to the customer]."

And with banks spending $1bn on refreshing in-branch IT, according to Datamonitor, introducing new 'smart' technology to identify customer behaviour or subsequent cross-selling opportunities or increase efficiency is obviously in the interest of financial institutions.

"It's giving you useful information based on the customer's profile," he said. "It's more information, better services, so you're not just asking the same question over and over again - your language preference [on an ATM], for example."

Accenture is also touting the digital paper and pen as a time-saver for banks. Customers using specially printed banking forms and a Bluetooth-enabled pen will automatically produce an onscreen copy without scanning the document or manually re-typing the information.

The technology has already been trialled with HBOS in the UK and has 90 to 93 per cent accuracy in reproducing the handwritten text onscreen.

However, the technology may not yet catch on. "When we've shown it to clients the reaction is sometimes positive, sometimes negative. They're more afraid people will steal the digital pen than the technology not working 100 per cent of the time."