Case study · Banking and VR
Suryoday Bank metaverse lounges
Virtual banking for customers with no branch nearby.
- Client
- Suryoday Bank
- Partner
- Kyndryl
- Service
- Design and development
- Sector
- Banking and VR
Suryoday, impact
What the lounges changed
Common banking tasks finished in roughly two thirds of the time they used to take.
Customers spent more time and did more inside the lounge than in the channel it replaced.
Guided flows inside the lounge answered questions that used to become support tickets.
Suryoday's existing AI chatbot reimagined as a fuller, more capable assistant living inside the lounge.
The brief
Banking for people the branch network never reached
A branch is a catchment area. If you are a new age customer who would rather not visit one, or an international customer with no branch to visit, the parts of banking that still assume a counter simply do not work for you. Onboarding is the worst of them, because it is the step that decides whether you become a customer at all.
Suryoday's answer was to build the branch instead of extending it: a set of virtual lounges where a customer can be onboarded and served end to end, delivered in partnership with Kyndryl.
Not a demo of a bank in VR. A place where onboarding actually completes.
The build
Multiple lounges, different user flows
The initiative is not one room. It is multiple virtual lounges that integrate different user flows, so the experience of a new customer being onboarded and an existing customer completing a task are not forced through the same path.
Inside them sits Tara 2.0, a reimagining of Suryoday's existing AI chatbot as a more wholesome, intelligent and fully featured assistant. In a branch that role is a person at a desk. In the lounge it is the thing that makes self service survivable for someone who has never used a headset before.
Wow Labz designed and developed the lounges on Unity for Meta Quest.
What it took
Three constraints that shaped it
Secure processes, new medium
The core challenge was adapting secure banking processes to a VR world without loosening them. The flows a bank is required to follow do not change because the customer is wearing a headset.
Navigation for a first headset
Many customers are new to VR entirely. Interaction had to be simple enough to learn in the moment, which is why selection is a tap on a card rather than anything a gamer would recognise.
Stable and physically comfortable
A lounge is only useful if people can stay in it. The design had to hold up technically and remain physically comfortable for the length of a real banking task, not a two minute demo.
Stack
What it was built with
Questions
The metaverse lounges, answered
What are Suryoday Bank's metaverse lounges?
Immersive VR lounges giving new age and international customers a full banking and onboarding experience without visiting a physical branch. Wow Labz designed and built them in partnership with Kyndryl.
What can a customer do inside a lounge?
Be onboarded as a new customer, and complete banking tasks as an existing one. The initiative runs multiple lounges integrating different user flows rather than pushing every customer down one path.
What is Tara 2.0?
Suryoday's existing AI chatbot, reimagined as a more wholesome, intelligent and fully featured assistant that lives inside the virtual lounges. It plays the role a person at a desk plays in a branch.
What was hard about putting banking into VR?
Adapting secure banking processes to a VR world without weakening them, keeping navigation simple enough for people who have never worn a headset, and holding the design technically stable and physically comfortable for the length of a real banking task.
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