IoT in Banks

By Raghavendra Prasad R

Do you have mobile app, which keeps track of your data usage, estimating your month-end data usage, alerting when you cross your pre-set daily data plan? What if you have a similar mobile app for banking? You bank could have an app, which alerts you about the special offers on your favorite brands, estimating your month-end balance and analyzes your spending patterns. It can provide you with savings, investment suggestions and financial planning suggestions as well!


Banks have been quick in adapting various technology trends. Customers have become more tech savvy and numbers of wearable devices are all the more increasing. In banks, IoT will bring an unimaginable level of data and data-driven customer insights. This will help banks in providing tailored services to customers, extend suggestions and provide latest offers on a daily basis, based on their daily transactions & trends already analyzed by banks.

IoT is a step ahead of what people think and this can be anything one can imagine. An example for IoT - customers stepping into their bank and the manager or a POC for customer relations helping is retrieving their account and latest transaction details, keeping them abuzz with the latest customer trends to help them take quick decisions based on the information available. IoT transactions are analyzed using big data analytics to give customers a tailored service.

Internet population is growing at a greater pace, as IoT is expected to grow to $20 billion devices and 6.59 devices per person in 2020.

However there are few concerns with IoT. Some of them are as stated below:

Privacy: One of the concerns to deal with IoT is that all transactions are collected and stored. So, there is no privacy, for ex: your smart watch, which has a GPS, will send your location details to banks or other companies to ensure organizations know your needs to perform focused sales.

Data Security Risk: Companies collect the tons of information, which includes even the minute details and, having loads of data pertaining to an individual is always prone to hacking. Incorporating latest data security technology to ensure that information is secure from hackers takes the center stage. Latest data security applications like Cloud Access Security, Machine-readable Threat Intelligence, and Big Data Security Analytics have become a must to ensure utmost protection of data from falling into the wrong hands.

Lack of applications: Currently, we are in the process of exploring and exploiting the maximum potential in arena of wearable and non-wearable devices like kiosks in banks. But, in the present situation, there are very few banking and finance applications developed for both the devices, as we are yet to realize the full potential of these smart devices.

IoT is one latest trend, which will change the way mankind is evolving! It will make banking easy, simple and faster than ever before. It will also change the way business is conducted in the future. So, we can confidently state that IoT will be the future of technology trends, especially in banking and finance sectors. IoT is the key factor, which will enable banks to move into Banking of Things.