Page 24 - ARUBA TODAY

A24 TECHNOLOGY
Tuesday 24 april 2018

Shanghai gets automated bank with VR, robots, face scanning

By DAKE KANG The trend toward automa-
SHANGHAI (AP) — Missed tion is not new. Retailers in
paying dues on your Com- China and elsewhere have
munist Party membership? been tinkering with auto-
There's a bank for that - mated supermarkets and
and it's fully automated. convenience stores, and
A state-owned Chinese Bank of America last year
bank has opened an au- piloted three automated
tomated branch equipped banks in the U.S., calling
with facial-scanning soft- them "advanced centers."
ware, a virtual reality room, It now has 14 such branch-
a hologram machine, es, featuring ATMs and vid-
talking robots and touch- eoconferencing capabili-
screens for paying utility bills ties.
and Communist Party fees, Still, the China Construction
among other functions. Bank branch takes tech-
The branch opened last nology a step further, with
week in central Shanghai's You and others citing its
Huangpu district and is be- face-scanning abilities as a
ing hyped as China's first breakthrough.
"unmanned bank." "Through the use of facial
Beijing-based China Con- recognition, even without
struction Bank says the a human in the loop, the
high-tech branch is meant system can ensure unique-
to make banking more ness of the individual at the
convenient, personalized, time of enrollment and can
and efficient. It also reflects verify each time the per-
growing competition from son conducts a transac-
cashless payment systems tion that they are who they
that are giving the banks a In this April 13, 2018, photo, a China Construction Bank employee demonstrates the use of face- claim to be," said Joseph
run for their money. scanning software at an automated bank in Shanghai. Atick, a biometrics expert
A robot greets customers at Associated Press and chairman of Identity
the entrance and answers International.
questions using voice rec- ence software allows VIP them," Tian said. "We hope transforming Chinese con- Industry analysts question
ognition software. Clients clients to request help from to come to a bank where sumer finance with mobile whether the other gad-
can swipe their national human employees based we can interact with ma- applications that enable gets add much value, say-
identification cards to en- elsewhere. chines." people to transfer money ing that existing ATMs and
ter the bank - or scan their News of the newfangled State-owned China Con- and pay for goods using online banking sites have
faces using the bank's fa- bank spread rapidly online, struction Bank, founded in their smartphones. already automated most
cial recognition device. drawing throngs of curious 1954 to fund large scale in- "These days, everyone is banking tasks.
Machines inside allow visi- observers. Tian Ting, a fi- frastructure projects, is the talking about banking or "If you go to a bank, you
tors to buy gold, change nance worker, said she was second largest bank world- financial innovation," said want a person, right? If
currency, or scout real es- impressed after touring the wide as measured by as- You Tianyu, vice president you're in the office and
tate investments using vir- branch one Friday morn- sets, and seems an unlikely of research at iYiou, a tech- you're like, I don't want to
tual reality googles. ing. tech pioneer. nology think tank. "This is go a bank, you'll just go on-
The bank isn't totally un- "These days, people are Analysts say the bank is re- kind of an experiment, line," says Chris DeAngelis,
staffed. Guards still stand less and less likely to be in- sponding to pressure from a shot in the dark, trying manager of Beijing-based
sentry, and a room clined to want other peo- internet giants like Alibaba to prove that traditional technology consultancy
equipped with teleconfer- ple to come and bother and Tencent, which are banks, too, can innovate." Alliance Development
Group. "There's nothing that
changes the world here."
Banking technologist Li Lin-
feng, who was scouting
the bank for Shenzhen-
based Ping An Insurance,
said he didn't think the
bank's implementation of
technology was particu-
larly thoughtful. Older folk
would likely need human
help navigating such cut-
ting-edge equipment, he
said.
"When you're exploring
these technologies, you
shouldn't just pay attention
to the technology itself, but
how people can interact
with these technologies,"
Li said. "Technology has to
serve us, not leave people
behind."q