Spain's Bankinter is to launch a service for customers to manage their brokerage accounts, and initiate transactions from their mobile phones by speaking into the phone in Spanish, and seeing the results on their screen.
Bankinter customers subscribing to the service will be able to call up price charts on their mobile screens and review spoken voice commands to buy and sell stocks.
The bank says it decided to launch the 'multimodal broker' service after extensive tests showed widespread customer support for a more intuitive mobile interface.
"Our customers want the flexibility to get financial information, and to transact business from their mobile phones, but do not like the current click-click and triple tapping interface," says Jesus Marquina, Bankinter CIO. "We strongly believe that offering them the choice of voice-enabled search, and of entering information by speaking while seeing the results on the screen, will further increase the number of completed self-care transactions, and improve customer satisfaction."
The service uses Kirusa Multimodal software integrated with Loquendo's speech technology. The application will be available to all customers in Spain, on several Java-based handsets over the mobile networks of Vodafone Spain, Telefonica Moviles, and Amena. Local systems integrator Internet Systems is reselling the platform, and providing support services to Bankinter.