The future of voice banking in the Mexican market

The use of voice assistants has become increasingly popular since it allows users to quickly search the internet or control and app in a hands-free way with the use of a simple voice command. Most of these interactions occur through Siri, Apple’s voice assistant, or Google Assistant, native to the Android operating system.

With increased acceptance, the use of voice assistants had been gaining traction at a global level and companies were increasingly creating applications for them.

BBVA is known within the Mexican market for being a pioneer in digital innovation by staying on top of global technologies and trends.

Prior to Amazon Alexa’s Launch in Mexico and considering the global success of smart speakers at a global level, BBVA wanted to explore the possibility and acceptance of banking over voice for its users to make an internal decision on the types of interactions to be developed.

On top of this, BBVA was looking for guidance on learning guidelines that would help them design the most natural voice interaction for its users.

Through a deeper understanding of different types of users, we were able to determine different banking actions that they were willing to carry out in different contexts. We also were able to conclude the types of information users expected to receive as well as the way they would like to ask the assistant.

Through in-depth interviews with different profiles such as users and experts, based on their level of comfort with technology, we were able to understand the different situations in which they currently interact with voice assistants and the types of requests that they make.

We also sought a better understanding of their perception of how secure they felt with an assistant handling their information as well as the outputs they would rather receive as a notification instead of voice.

Based on our previous knowledge working with voice assistants and chatbots, we carried out a workshop with the BBVA team where we taught them how to design for voice with a heavy emphasis on Alexa Skills. We also co-designed functionalities that responded to the needs with the highest demand through different Voice User Interface (VUI) tools.