Table of Contents
ABOUT BANCO FALABELLA
Banco Falabella is a bank that has the objective of improving the quality of life of the people by having long term relationships with them, based on transparency, simplicity and convenience. Its headquarters are in Las Condes, Chile with branches in Peru and Colombia.
SITUATION
They came to us because they wanted to provide to their clients an easy access to their online banking system through wearable devices, more specifically for the Samsung Gear S2 & for the Apple watch. From their wearable, the customers would be able to access and see how many points they accumulated, details of their cards associated to the account, the branch offices of Banco Falabella, the contact information and the dynamic key for security.
WHAT WE DID
It’s important to know that at that time, you could only have an app for wearables if a mobile app was already developed. We therefore had to develop the app for the wearables as well as for the mobile phones.
- iOS: we used Swift to develop the version for iPhone & Apple watch.
- Android: we did it with Java, HTML5, CSS3 & JavaScript and used the framework Tizen for Samsung phones & Samsung Gear S2.
Let’s keep in mind that Falabella bank already had an API SOA and they also had an internal system which was a native application for desktop. The application for desktop would connect to their API SOA and so did we for the new applications we were developing.
How does the communication among devices work? The data information is downloaded from the API SOA to the mobile in a JSON format and is then sent to the wearable. For the other way around, the wearable sends the information (also in a JSON format) to the mobile app that then communicates with the API SOA.
For the project, we went through five main steps:
- Normalize the API SOA
- Develop the mobile app for iOS
- Develop the wearable app for Apple watch
- Develop the mobile app for Android
- Develop the app for the Samsung Gear S2
THE CHALLENGE
For iOS, we wrote the app using Swift technology which at the time was not mature enough. This implies that its community was small and that it lacked support and information.
For Android, there was 2 different technologies; the wearable was built with Tizen framework (HTML5, JavaScript & CSS3) and the mobile app was built with Java. The difficult part was enable the communication between both technologies and to coordinate the actions of the mobile device with the wearable.
KEY LEARNINGS & MAIN RESULTS
At the time, wearables were still really new and so it was an amazing experience because we got the opportunity to really learn how it all works and to know more about the integration of wearables to an API SOA. How did Banco Falabella benefit from the app?
| ⊕ satisfaction of its customer increased | ⊕ increase of the usage of the application |
| ⊕ higher conversion rate | ⊕ more transactions are made |
