WebRTC is far from being a production solution for large financial institutions. If and when it becomes one, it will not only provide major cost reductions, but will also introduce many additional benefits.
One such benefit, which is key to financial organizations, is easier, fuller evidence keeping.
Today, a consumer can interact with their bank or insurance company via phone, while sending them signed documentation via email, mobile app (even fax ..) and go through their website for info (when this info might be misleading or out of context of the conversation). Alas, with today’s technology, it’s nearly impossible to capture all these interactions in real time, in the right context, and correlate them to provide a full “omni-channel” evidence.
In today’s world, where such requirements are rare to none, it’s important to partner with the right vendor that supports generically recording all these channels and correlating them.
However, in a WebRTC-enabled world, a financial advisor can offer “add-on products” to a consumer via video chat, while sending her/him the relevant disclaimer on the same WebRTC channel via chat and getting it digitally signed in the same session.
In the last few years, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) took enforcement action against organizations (mostly financials) for unfair billing practices of “add-on products”, which resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of refunds.
In the future, recorded WebRTC sessions will provide all the evidence needed to prove compliance, including not only the actual conversation via video chat but also the sent text disclaimer and received digital signature. Organizations can even automate such processes and use all the relevant channels in the same WebRTC session in order to ensure regulatory compliance .
In summary, WebRTC is the realization of the omni-channel dream, creating perfect customer experiences, and converging several service channels into one session that can be recorded, archived with the right retention according to rich contextual information, played back as needed and extracted/packaged as evidence for any pesky regulator.