“If you have experienced vertigo or heart disease or any serious medical condition, this may not be the right experience,” my metaverse guide warned me before I donned the Meta Quest 2 virtual reality headset. 

My guide—Victor Plante, a senior consultant at global tech and management consultancy Capco—was sitting across from me in Toronto’s TD Bank tower. But in the metaverse his photorealistic avatar greeted me in the open air virtual events centre where TD interns and co-op students get a chance to mix and mingle as part of the bank’s onboarding pilot program. As at a real-world mixer, they can hear the background chatter surrounding them, while also listening to the conversations in which they’re participating directly. 

Plante led me around the networking centre, explaining the portals to different spaces participants can use, like one room where the bank hosts lunch and learn sessions, presentations and leadership networking events, with the mountains of Montenegro as a backdrop.  

In May, Insider published an obituary for the metaverse—the virtual reality spaces where users can interact with each other and with a computer-generated environment—arguing that it’s “headed to the tech industry’s graveyard of failed ideas.” Companies like Disney and Microsoft have been ending their metaverse initiatives altogether. Nevertheless, TD and RBC are conducting metaverse pilot programs so they can be in on the ground floor if and when the technology does take off.  

The wave of metaverse skepticism hasn’t caused concern for Rizwan Khalfan, executive vice president, chief digital and payments officer at TD. 

“Trends are coming at us at a pace that we’ve never seen before,” he said. “We are constantly figuring out what is the right level of investment,” he said.

“You don’t want to be caught on the sidelines and suddenly that technology becomes more prominent in our day to day lives as consumers and then you’re trying to catch up. But, at the same time, you don’t want to go too hard at it and then realize it was a trend last year.” 

“It’s a fine line between leading and bleeding edge,” Khalfan said. 

While the technology still needs to evolve—as do the avatars’ form factor—Khalfan said he expects the experience to advance over time to suit customer needs.  

Employees’ metaverse avatars can talk with their hands, shift their bodies around, blink and move their mouths while speaking. Yet some challenges remain, notably that avatars are like sculptural busts, showing only the head, neck, and upper shoulders and chest, with disembodied hands moving about. 

The headset worn to access the metaverse can also be a bit cumbersome. Imran Khan, head of global innovation at TD, likened the current model to an early stage cellphone, which was big and bulky before evolving into the sleek and light devices we have today.

“[The pilot] is really about collaborating and learning new technologies,” Khan said. “We wanted to give our early talent an opportunity to do that.”

If and when the metaverse does go mainstream, the team wants to be ready, armed with the right skills and expertise, and knowing how TD will position itself in the market, Khalfan said.

Andrew Kiguel, co-founder and CEO of Tokens.com and executive chair of Metaverse Group, its virtual real estate subsidiary, said the banks are readying themselves for generation Alpha. 

Born between 2010 and 2025, they are expected to be the largest generation in history encompassing over two billion people by 2025, he said. 

TD and its ilk are asking questions about this demographic and wondering how they can dip their toe in the water in order to make sure they’re “ready to provide for this very powerful cohort in the future.”

So far, TD is pleased with the results of its pilot, which ran from January to April. According to Jennifer Sanders, the bank’s associate vice president, global early talent and executive search, 92 per cent of co-op students and interns surveyed said the VR experience improved their co-op and intern experience. 

“We have heard from a few participants in the pilot that while they considered themselves to be introverted, they found the virtual reality environment provided them the confidence to engage more comfortably with their peers and executives than in a traditional Webex or in-person setting,” she said.

The value is the immersiveness itself, Khan said. “You’re very focused. You’re not distracted,” he said, which can come in handy when learning new information. “We got feedback that it was much better than just a zoom-type call.” Khan said TD’s investment in the metaverse when it comes to the employee experience will likely increase, particularly when it comes to learning and education. 

RBC, meanwhile, is using the metaverse as one way to advance its effort to teach financial literacy to children and youth in the spaces they frequent. 

The bank is particularly focused on the online gaming platform Roblox, said Jason Storsley, RBC’s senior vice president of everyday banking and leader of its youth and young adult client segment team. 

Roblox was appealing in part because it “has rigorous parameters in place to ensure safety for users and brands—particularly important for its young audiences,” he said in an email. 

Working with Toronto-based Gamelancer, a media and entertainment company, RBC built a branch along with a financial literacy experience inside the free, role-playing Roblox game Seaboard City, and ran a pilot from mid-February to mid-March.

In the virtual city, players were able to enter an RBC branch, interact with advisers and go on a scavenger hunt that saw them collect items and look for RBC mascot Leo the Lion. Each interaction included a financial literacy lesson. Players could then use virtual RBC coins to redeem for in-game items or supplies needed to complete quests. 

The bank’s Roblox content “covered the importance of learning about money, budgeting tips and advice about how to be a smart consumer,” Storsley said.

The bank is evaluating future metaverse opportunities.

TD’s also testing out a customer experience in the metaverse with client-adviser meetings. Clients that can’t meet in person or don’t want to use the bank’s Webex offering could one day have the option to meet an adviser in a safe, secure space on a virtual platform to review their portfolio, Khalfan said. 

“If you want to collaborate around the customers’ data and insights, it’s a lot more enriching, active, graphically appealing if you do it on a virtual platform,” he said, citing the opportunity to visualize different financial scenarios for the customer.

Right now, however, the focus is on “empowering our colleagues and seeing what the real value proposition is before we launch it for our clients,” Khalfan said.