Leapfrogging to voice

Businesses in the Asia Pacific increasingly cater their products toward digital natives. These, of course, are millenials and younger generations who grew up with digital technology as a fact of life, as compared to a person who had to adopt it as a digital immigrant.

There is a new technological cohort that businesses should cater to; voice natives. These are people who grew up accustomed to interfacing with devices through their voice, as popularized through such assistants as Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri.

This comfort for voice-enabled interaction cannot be emphasized enough, as their counterpart, those voice immigrants, tend to prefer legacy interactions like typing, pointing and clicking with a mouse or trackpad, or navigating via touchscreen. These voice immigrants, in short, prefer tactile feedback.

Why should businesses in the Asia Pacific care that there is an increasing number of people opting for voice over tactile interfaces? It’s because the use cases for voice are evolving, and evolving fast.

Most people in the region still associate voice with low-level commands: You can tell your voice assistant which song to play on Spotify, research basic queries through Google and recite them back to you, or check your schedule on your online calendar.

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But the voice will increasingly be shifting toward higher-value work, owing to the current state of mobile penetration.

Between 2018 and 2019, mobile penetration has risen in Indonesia by 9 per cent, the Philippines by 14 per cent, Malaysia by 17 per cent, Thailand by 19 per cent, and Vietnam by 24 per cent. The rise of mobile ownership in ASEAN sets the stage for the rise of voice.

“Southeast Asia has produced a whole digital generation whose first experience with the Internet is via smart mobile devices. The region is set to leapfrog technology once again with digital transactions initiated and fulfilled, more and more, via voice,” said Nilendu Mukherjee, the Regional Sales Head for ASEAN at Financial Software and Systems (FSS), one of the companies at the heart of this new tech frontier.

Founded in India in 1991, FSS services companies around the world, providing them with end-to-end payment solutions that include everything from issuance and digital banking to analytics and payments processing. Its latest solution is what it calls FSS Voice Commerce.

FSS Voice Commerce connects with the core systems of banks on the back-end, allowing their customers to conduct transactions through any voice-capable device made by Amazon, Google Home, Apple, and all the other brands in the space. Powered by machine learning, FSS Voice Commerce analyzes customer behavioural patterns and other data points to predict the next step of the conversation.

Preparing the voice ecosystem

Before consumers can regularly check their bank statements via their voice, pay their bills or merchants, or engage with advisory services, the banks themselves need to be first onboard. There needs, in short, to be an ecosystem around voice. The ecosystem is just as important as the innovator, a fact you can see in spaces like grocery-delivery.

While Webvan pioneered the concept of grocery-delivery as early as the dot-com boom, it was not until the broader ecosystem of logistics, payments, and other key partners arose that allowed the industry to flourish in such companies as Instacart, Amazon Fresh, Google Express, and Brandless.

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In much the same way, FSS is also focused on building its broader ecosystem of partners. The company is exhibiting at Seamless Philippines this week, as part of a larger initiative to grow its ASEAN presence, given that the region has now surpassed the west in digital payments growth.

FSS believes that voice will play a crucial role in developing its market leadership.

“FSS is gung-ho on voice as part of the company’s two-pronged approach to strengthen its market position: consolidating key strategic partnerships with leading banks, processors and fintech companies to develop targeted payment propositions; and investing heavily to build state-of-the-art infrastructure to drive growth and innovation. In this way we capitalize on a booming digital payments market,” said Ram Chari, FSS Global Business Head.

This premise is promising, given the growing ubiquity of voice-enabled devices. There are already 2 billion such devices in the hands of consumers worldwide, and 54 per cent of their users turn to these voice assistants at least once a day.

If a voice-driven future becomes a reality, consumers in ASEAN can look forward to more seamless and convenient user experience for their financial services.

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Image Credit: Ilyass SEDDOUG

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