Summary
- Virtual reality in the finance sector
- More immersive visual data thanks to virtual reality
- Virtual reality in education and recruitment
The Goldman Sachs group predicts that the virtual reality market will reach $ 80 billion by 2025. In the meantime, we will see new uses as technology evolves and new industries adopt it. Goldman Sachs believes it could, at best, reach $ 182 billion. For this reason, banks and financial institutions are the first to take an interest in virtual and augmented reality in order to define what benefits they could derive from it. A few avenues have already been explored by the finance sector.
Virtual reality in the finance sector
Young people from the “generation Y” are the core customers of banks, and they are gradually moving away. According to the Millenial Disruption Index, 73% of young people surveyed seek new offers from Google, PayPal or Apple rather than from their banks, while 33% say they can do without the banking system.
Their knowledge of new technologies and video games coupled with their dislike of complex and boring content distracts them from traditional banking institutions. The challenge for the financial sector will be to adopt a language that appeals to young people, who constitute the customers of tomorrow. They will therefore need offer these generations familiar environments, by transforming figures into visual, fun and engaging data.
More immersive visual data thanks to virtual reality
Finance and trading have become unintelligible to young people and, by extension, to ordinary people. Seeing data, numbers, percentages on a 2D screen is not engaging, so there is a certain distrust of the banking system. Customers feel helpless in the face of those things they don't understand and can't control. With a virtual reality headset, she could interact with these figures in a playful way and there is no longer any doubt today that a seemingly boring activity can be made fun through interactivity.
Virtual reality trading
Citibank traders have adopted Microsoft Hololens in their work. They use it in addition to other software. Colors and 3D make the study of numbers, which some will qualify as austere, much more understandable and fun. Microsoft's augmented reality headset makes it easier for traders to spot opportunities. Their work is therefore facilitated. This new use makes activities such as navigating between data, researching market developments or collaborating with customers less restrictive.
Wealth management in virtual reality
Fidelity Investments developed StockCity on Oculus Rift, a tool that allows data visualization to facilitate the investments of the wealthy. Concretely, the data is transformed into a virtual city where capitals are represented by buildings whose dimensions represent values. Fidelity tries by this way to connect with the new generations. “If you want to deliver a good consumer experience, you have to be in the same type of environment as them,” says Seth Brooks, director of product management at Fidelity Labs.
Virtual reality in education and recruitment
Learning
Financial education has the potential to become one of the major applications of virtual and augmented reality. The idea of interactive and fun learning immediately seems much more attractive than traditional learning based on books and exercise books. The finance sector being difficult to assimilate, students could learn to trade with pleasure using technology.
Recruitment and training
Virtual reality can also be used by banks and financial institutions as an in-house recruitment and training tool. The Commonwealth Bank of Australia has developed a VR application to attract talented profiles. This shows, through a Google cardboard, how the bank meets the needs of customers and employees in an innovative and agile way. In this virtual experience, users are invited to create an application for one of the bank's customers. By this process, they already feel integrated into the team even before they are hired.
EON Reality, a 3D software developer, took recruiting even further by creating an application where candidates are interviewed, facing different avatars controlled by a real recruiter. In an immersive and realistic environment, the candidate answers several questions based on his own answers. There is therefore a saving of time and manpower, because the interviews can be carried out remotely.
