High five for 5G

The new service, the speedy 5G connection, is already out in the US as a pre-standard network by Verizon. However, standards-based networks of both Verizon and AT&T are so close to launching that we can already call 2018 a breakthrough year for the technology. 5G-capable smartphones from Samsung and other vendors (not Apple, though) are also in the pipeline for next year.

The EU takes a slower approach but it has just accepted new measures that would help the rollout of 5G in Europe. Industry body GSMA estimates 1.3bn 5G-connections by 2025, covering 40% of the world’s population. When in full swing, the new networks will allow for the rise of IoT and faster and safer connections to everyone.

Robos Rising

We’ve seen the robots before but never in such an abundance. Chatbots flooded the whole internet, taking over simpler customer service tasks, answering plain questions and, in case of more complex queries, they redirect the visitor to a human assistant. And those are only the robots hiding behind websites and only showing a set of characters of themselves.

Others get a physical body and come out to the limelight, though. SoftBank Robotics’ humanoid robot named Pepper made its first appearance already in 2014 but it has grown up: it now responds to human emotions and can answer questions about products or services. Two of its German versions, Luna and Monaco Pepper, take their role one step further. They have a permanent home in one of Bremen’s Sparkasse bank branches and keep regular contact with clients. They can even tell jokes! But, in the hindsight, there is more than that: by learning every day, they have the potential to take over more complex tasks as well.

Artificial or Virtual, Both a Reality Already

Smart glasses creating an augmented reality (AR) have found their way to the offices this year. At the Consumer Electronics Week in the summer in New York, ThirdEye Gen presented its X1 glasses: workers who wear them in the office can make remote colleagues see exactly what they see. These advantages can also be translated into serious savings in operational costs: according to Forbes’ report, as much as 40% can be achieved using AR or VR-technology in certain industries. One of the businesses in the know, French banking giant BNP Paribas, has also announced the rollout of a VR-based app and a set of new services for its retail customers last year. It allows the clients to manage their accounts in a different way or make decisions easier but it also allows the bank to create a new type of operation.

Foldable phones

California-based Royole and Samsung announced their own foldable mobile phone models almost simultaneously. Both can transform into tablets when unfolded – arguably the most genuine announcements this year. Creating a totally new product category, it has the potential to create a new definition of work as well.

Royole’s Flexpai phone, when folded, works as a dual screen with both screens operating independently or in interaction with each other as needed. It works on the Flexpai+ platform that can be integrated into other devices or applications as well, giving the California startup quite a growth potential. Meanwhile, Samsung has also presented its foldable phone, though only available commercially from 2019. The company calls the display technology Infinity Flex Display and Android has already announced to support it.

Hybrids Going One Step Further

Lenovo didn’t sit on its laurels, either, and came up with an innovation in the laptop-tablet hybrid category. The Yoga Book C930, presented at the IFA trade show in Berlin this year, has dual-screen with a 10.8-inch size, with the secondary display being an e-ink one that can also morph into a virtual keyboard. Actually, this second screen has three functions: keyboard, notepad, and e-reader. The first screen is a Windows-based regular display. Despite the many features of the device, Lenovo might still have a hard time selling it given the non-exceptional nature of either function but it is still an interesting product worth mentioning.  

AI in CRM

AI being the winning technology in the field is a claim also made by CRM market leader Salesforce and IDC, based on a recent joint study. According to them, 28% of the respondent companies already have AI in place, while 41% plan to have it in the next two years.

Salesforce itself has upgraded its Einstein software this year, giving it a new feature that integrates customer service tasks in the regular service offering and allows Einstein to handle routine requests building on customer history, natural language processing, and machine learning. one of the other major announcements of this summer was Microsoft committing to AI-based analytics. The tools to provide this experience include chatbots, predictive lead scoring based on communication traffic patterns, and automated welcome emails, among others.

Newcomers to the market already have AI in their initial offerings and investors are keen to support such projects. One of the latest announcements is of Spiro Technologies that claims downright the title of “the first AI-powered CRM”: it has raised USD 1.5mn in seed funding that will be used to add even more AI features to the product.

Fast Finance with Apps

Let’s not forget about mobile app innovations, some true delicacies for an enterprise mobility vendor like us. Our favorite this year was also awarded a Mobie Award by Enterprise Mobility Exchange as the most effective mobile app integration: financing solution specialist DLL’s Express Finance. It is a sales tool that helps sales reps quote financing payments to customers, a complex task with many scenarios with a process that is just as confusing for the clients as it is for the sales workers.

The new app, Express Finance, is a user-facing app that simplified the pricing process by offering a real-time pricing service, proposal generation, and POS closings. The reps can find all the relevant information they need to quote a payment in the app, no other information source needed. As a result, they managed to achieve a 90% reduction in their time-to-quote rates. DLL calls it an amazing success and it’s hard to think otherwise – we are glad to see the direction enterprise app development is going!

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Pushing consumers first

Consumer-oriented trade shows like CES always play a huge role in introducing or pushing new technologies, no matter how strange they may seem at first. The most recent giant show, CES Asia, was held at the end of June and didn’t fail to paint a colorful picture of futuristic consumer technology.

Putting aside pure entertainment and cutting-edge weirdness, the robots tended to show up everywhere and in such forms that promote their mainstream use. In a world depicted by the event, consumers would be surrounded by flying cars, live in a fully connected smart home that is served by automation, be it VEDAs or IoT.

So far they are just the buzzwords we know so well. What’s more interesting is that vendors have been relentlessly pushing virtual reality and augmented reality (VR and AR) solutions and have even indicated that these could be deployed by business earlier than consumers – a phenomenon that would be unique on its own.

Professional skepticism aside

VR and AR are mostly known as the technologies that require freaky-looking glasses and a lot of patience on the user side. So how come they can make business sense already?

For one, those glasses are not in the way of work as much as they would in everyday activities. Seeing models what they would look in real life gives engineers an advantage they would trade for comfort. Remote workers of all kinds can benefit from sharing the glass screens with their colleagues.

These advantages can also be translated into serious savings in operational costs: according to Forbes’ report, as much as 40% can be achieved using VR-technology in certain industries. While we don’t have an exact figure for the financial industry at hand, the number of announcements and reports that tackle the topic indicates banks and insurers have also had some early success digging the gold of the new reality.

What VR and AR Have in Stock for the Financial Services Industry?

The insurance industry is one of the early adopters of technology, mainly in simulations and training. Car crashes, breakdowns, or even the onboarding of staff can be great opportunities to use VR. According to a fresh report by KMPG, the adoption rates are expected to increase significantly as the awareness spreads and the technology becomes more sophisticated.

More interestingly, though, VR and AR presents a different kind of opportunity as well for the insurers: namely developing new products that assess the risks of the mass use of these technologies (accidents, security risks, privacy abuse, etc.) KPMG estimates the losses to be covered can reach USD 20bn.

Other financial service providers, such as banks and credit institutions, are sitting on valuable data reserves that require analysis, preferably one that is quick to make and easy to interpret. CitiBank has been experimenting with a holographic workstation for upgrading its trading services, while Wells Fargo is onto creating a virtual space, a branch substitute if you like, where clients and agents can interact, and Comarch of Poland also helps its clients in communicating in an augmented environment.  

French banking giant BNP Paribas has also announced the rollout of a VR-based app and a set of new services for its retail customers last year. It allows the clients to manage their accounts in a different way or make decisions easier but it also allows the bank to create a new type of operation.

Payment processing is another field where banks and payment services companies are motivated to introduce the new technology. Worldpay has virtual terminals for smaller and AirPIN for bigger purchases, both representing a new generation of payments that customers demand and will ultimately engage with. Payscout, on the other hand, has a virtual environment where clients are able to buy physical goods with Visa Checkout and also has a virtual space for donations.

The most talk in the financial services industry is about whether virtual spaces can substitute bank branches in the long term. With the appearance of digital-only banks and mobile banking, the question is timely and the saving potential is enormous. Financial institutions are looking for feasible solutions for sure, yet they are cautious not to turn customer sentiment into negative. By all means, consumer awareness of AR/VR and its engagement capabilities (banking in a nice, easy-to-use virtual environment versus a crappy branch not so nearby) is something to trust.  

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AI and AR Will Extend Our Mobile Boundaries

The rise of artificial intelligence didn’t even leave business mobiles untouched: it has made its way to the workplace. Its capabilities of predicting decisions in basic scenarios have already proved to be an essential addition to the arsenal of efficiency-boosting methods, and some predict it will be everywhere by 2022.  

AI will only gain further ground because of its analytics capabilities in 2018, as businesses increasingly feel pressured to use their data assets. The Internet of Things (IoT) is making the data situation only more pressing. With streamlining business processes, AI can be another excellent tool for savings costs. Meanwhile, the networks are being strengthened with 5G to be able to provide the analysis and insights in the shortest possible timeframes.

We are still to see, though, in 2018, where augmented reality (AR) will lead our businesses. There are some obvious applications in the utility sector or in retail that are already taking shape, and the software part of the equation is well-covered anyway. One important thing is still lacking, though: a proper headset, that would make business put AR in practice (of course Apple and others are working hard already on solving this problem).

On the other hand, the user experience is evolving in many different ways, too. Mobile has the most significant impact of all, prompting the transformation of corporate websites to mobile-first format and progressive web apps. The voice/speaking and chat options penetrate all interfaces, making getting work tasks done and team collaboration easier – thus improving overall efficiency.

Services in the Cloud and Other Locations

In the age of ubiquitous connection, offering location-based services is one of the most promising areas of development. For enterprise mobility, it means being able to track workers everywhere, all the time, and helping them with that. Wherever a problem emerges, the office workers can have the backs of their field colleagues: think maps, blueprints, instructions, client data. All employees can save time by using geo-tagged photos and indoor navigation to products in a store or service stations in an office, as popular examples.

Similarly, selected information can be made available to clients, allowing them to see whether the maintenance worker is on the way or the sales agent is in a place where he can be available for a call. Customers in specific areas can be shown particular promotions or offered specific benefits or discounts.

Cloud services are also on the rise like never before, due to the significant service price drops and the ever-growing popularity of BYOD – smartphones flooding the workplaces. But businesses have also realized that not every type of data is worth to be trusted to the cloud, so, for security reasons, we will likely see the on-premise storages remain in place for the most business-critical information.

Security Threats in 2018

New devices, new operating systems, new (consumer) apps – they all pose a threat in the workplaces increasingly relying on BYOD (again). Security experts warn that accessing corporate data with poorly secured consumer devices and apps can be one of the most significant challenges to the IT-departments this year.

One solution to these pains can be AI itself, with its capabilities of recognizing misuse and signs of breach earlier. The protection will have to be set to prevent the data from leakage, like scanning new apps for these properties. But sometimes even that is not enough, like in the case of phishing and other elaborate methods of hacker trickery, against which further training of employees can be a viable solution.

Surprisingly, ransomware is not at all that common of a threat than one would imagine – most breaches we hear about happen on desktops instead. Mostly because app stores do a proper job screening new applications and enterprise apps apparently don’t contain malware, and those are the ways people get their software. On desktops, it is easier for hackers to hide a malicious piece of code and cause significant trouble.

All that doesn’t mean, though, that businesses don’t have to be alert to such options on mobiles. The continuous evolvement of malware (especially ransomware) techniques makes them a real threat if once an efficient way of installing them on mobiles is found.

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