Robots to form promising segment of bank customers – Sberbank

Today various robots start entering our everyday life on many different levels. Having become a reality on the roads, self-driving cars carry passengers, foresee accidents, suffer traffic accidents – they are real subjects of our lives. At the same time robots, like humans, have to consume goods and services that are vitally important for their operation (electricity, consumables, preventive maintenance, repairs and so on). Taking into account the progress already seen in machine learning and artificial intelligence, and the growing autonomy of robots, prerequisites for turning them into subjects of economic life may appear in the foreseeable future. 

Robots may develop a need to buy necessary goods and services on their own, without human intervention, and therefore, they will need payment services, as well as banking and other related services. In other words, such robot will be gradually turning from an object into a full-fledged subject of banking and payment markets. The examples include driverless cars able to pay autonomously for fuel, electricity and maintenance, the Internet of things where a refrigerator buys products and a washing machine – laundry detergent.

Against this backdrop, banks should begin to study a fundamentally new, large category of customers as early as today, to be fully prepared and able to effectively meet all robots’ needs when they start to comsume banking services. With the current pace of technological development, it may happen in 15-20 years or even earlier. 

Sberbank is keeping an eye on the latest trends in this field and exploring the development potential of a new segment of the banking services market.

Source: PLUSworld.ru