Bankinter to Launch Multimodal Service Powered by Kirusa

MADRID, Spain and EDISON, N.J. - The first such application, called the multimodal broker, will allow the bank's brokerage customers to manage their brokerage accounts, and to do brokerage transactions from their mobile phones by speaking into the phone in Spanish, and seeing the results on their screen.

Under terms of the agreement, the Kirusa Multimodal solution has been delivered and deployed at Bankinter, and has been integrated with Loquendo's speech technology.  Bankinter is using a java API to develop the "multimodal broker" application.  The application will be available to all customers in Spain, on several java based handsets over the mobile networks of Vodafone Spain, Telefonica Moviles, and Amena. Internet Systems is reselling the platform, and providing the systems integration and support services to Bankinter.

 "Our customers want the flexibility to get financial information, and to transact business from their mobile phones, but do not like the current click-click and triple tapping interface", said Jesus Marquina, chief information officer of Bankinter.  "We strongly believe that offering them the choice of voice enabled search, and of entering information by speaking while seeing the results on the screen will further increase the number of completed self-care transactions, and improve customer satisfaction."  He continued, "We wanted a multimodal platform that was robust, standards compliant, that could scale to all our customers and all our mobile applications, and that could add multimodal support to java applications as well as to .NET Compact Framework and to Web-based applications accessed through a browser.  After extensive testing and evaluation, we find the Kirusa platform to be the most advanced, scalable, and flexible in the market."