#CapitalOneHouse @ Antone’s — and the Power of Listening
By Don Busick, Senior Vice President, Digital Product Management, Capital One
It’s great to be back at SXSW.
Since Friday at the #CapitalOneHouse at Antone’s we hosted more than 20 product, tech and design talks and demos by day and some amazing musicians by night, including a fantastic private acoustic set by Aloe Blacc. (For those who weren’t here with us in Austin, I would highly encourage you to check out the DevExchange Spotify playlist, which features all of the musicians we’ve hosted at Antone’s this year.)
Clifford Antone, the founder of the historic blues club in Austin, is known for saying “I love to play, but I’d rather listen.” And that’s really the spirit behind why we’re at Antone’s — to connect with others, exchange ideas, and ultimately to listen and get feedback from our customers and partners on new innovations we’re bringing to market as well as new concepts we’re exploring and testing.
Over the past couple of days, we rolled out several new digital products aimed to provide our customers with effortless experiences that help them manage their money, such as Eno, the first natural language SMS chatbot from a U.S. bank. With Eno, we’re adding another way for customers to talk with us about their money in a way that fits naturally into their daily lives.
What I love most about our time at SXSW (aside from all the amazing food, especially the tacos) is feeling the energy everywhere, including at Antone’s. It’s that energy — and the feeling that anything’s possible — that keeps us coming back for the past several years. It’s an ideal place for our people — who are entrepreneurial at heart and passionate about challenging the status quo — a chance to share their thoughts, ideas and products with other innovators and disruptors who are equally passionate about harnessing technology and design to make a meaningful difference in other people’s lives.
As a data-driven, founder-led company with a highly entrepreneurial culture, we have always challenged ourselves to try new things, test and retest, and push the limits of technology to give it more humanity for the sake of our customers. As we reimagine the future of the banking experience, we’re doing so with a purpose — to empower our customers to feel confident about their relationship with their money.
Eno, our new SMS chatbot, is just one example of that. With Eno, customers can get quick access to their Capital One credit card and bank account balances, see recent transactions and even make a credit card payment to their account by texting in natural language. Eno uses natural language processing to understand the different ways that customers text about their money so that our customers can talk with us about money-wherever and whenever. Eno even recognizes certain emojis: send a bag of money emoji 💰for a quick summary of your accounts or send a “thumbs up” emoji 👍to confirm a payment. You can read more about how the design behind Eno was inspired by listening to our customers in a great blog by our Head of Conversation Design Steph Hay (the one taking the selfie of the Eno team below.)
As machine learning technologies continue to advance, I’m incredibly excited about the potential for delivering breakthrough experiences for our customers — to help people with their financial lives in ways that we can’t even imagine today.
At SXSW, we also highlighted two new tools focused on providing our customers with insights that make saving more effortless.
We announced an update for the Capital One Wallet that leverages machine learning, cloud computing, and location-based technologies to provide our customers with discounts at stores where they already shop. Using the Wallet app on Android, customers now have the option to receive alerts of location-based coupons that can be immediately redeemed in store. Customers can also login to see coupons at nearby stores where they already shop. We know people are inundated with too much non-useful information every day, so we placed a lot of focus on quality with this experience and deployed the strictest filters for what notifications we provide and when they are provided — the goal is to provide our customers with timely insights that make it easy to save.
The other tool we shared was Paribus, which automates the process of tracking price drops at select, online merchants and securing the price difference. Paribus uses its proprietary technology to automatically track price fluctuations and navigate diverse store price guarantee policies so customers can save effortlessly on their online purchases. Since its launch less than two years ago, Paribus has saved millions of dollars in price drop refunds for its users that otherwise could have gone unclaimed.
We know that we can’t change reimagine banking on our own, and this weekend we also celebrated the one-year anniversary of DevExchange, marking the occasion with new partners, new API products, and new open source projects, such as Hydrograph, a developer-friendly visual tool designed to help deploy and manage complex ETL jobs. At Capital One, we’ll be using Hydrograph to get large amounts of data in and out of our big data environments and to improve productivity for ETL devs.
We believe that external developers, startups and other innovators will be co-creators of the next generation of digital banking and fintech experiences. APIs, open source projects and new platform-powered tools are making it easier than ever for developers to build solutions for customers, and these dynamics have huge implications for financial institutions, consumers, aggregators and developers alike.
I’m incredibly thankful for all of our teams and partners who are working hard to challenge the status quo in banking and for all those who came out to connect with us at SXSW this year.
For now, the sun is about to set in Austin, so I’m going to sign off, grab a few more tacos, and settle in to listen to Austin’s own Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears, Matthew Logan Vasquez, and A Giant Dog at the Capital One House @ Antone’s tonight.
