Give your bank a competitive edge with state-of-the-art intelligent video solutions

Over the past ten years, the banking industry has experienced unprecedented change, moving further away from traditional brick-and-mortar retail bank branches to the omni-channel banking system we now know, with mobile apps, video tellers and other digital financial services.

This rapid pace of change has left many banks grappling with their strategic priorities. Investing in the customer experience and digital technology are top of mind for many institutions, but security, risk management and compliance still remain vitally important to banks. What some may not know is that the tools used for security – in particular, IP video surveillance – can actually help banks gain a much clearer picture of their entire operation, with valuable business insights that can be applied across many functional areas.

Video surveillance solutions that integrate transaction data, analytics and other data sources can provide information on a bank’s customer service, promotional efforts and operations, in addition to helping improve security and reduce risk. These solutions are often referred to as “intelligent video” because they go beyond physical security, to delivering business intelligence.

So who is using intelligent video and where exactly can it help? Some of the leading financial institutions in the world are leveraging these solutions for the following benefits:

To gather data for branch transformation efforts – When surveillance video is combined with ATM/teller transaction data and analytics from sensors that collect people counting, queue length, dwell time and presence detection data, it can help banks gather amazing insights on branch service and operations, data that can be used for branch transformation efforts. The accurate, anonymous data collected through intelligent video can indicate, for example, how many customers visit each branch per day and how long on average it takes to complete each customer’s transaction.

Many forward-thinking banks, like Bank of Hawaii (BOH), are using this data to analyse peak service times to ensure adequate staffing levels and improve customer service.

For compliance monitoring – Banks, especially Tier 1 banks, face strict regulations on everything from security and privacy, to fair lending practices. Intelligent video solutions can help banks ensure they are complying with these rules by visually monitoring branch and ATM activities and alerting managers to unusual behaviour. Take for example the rules around anti-money laundering (AML) practices. Banks around the world face stiff AML regulations and non-compliance can result in multi-million dollar fines.

When surveillance video is combined with a bank’s ATM/teller transaction data and analytics, it can be a powerful AML tool for finding unusual, high dollar transactions and patterns in transactions that could indicate money laundering. Intelligent video can raise an alert if the same person makes repeated transactions above a certain dollar amount and within a short timespan (for example, the same day or week). These solutions allow banks to sort transactions by amount, card number or account number so they can easily review all movements of large sums of money and pinpoint patterns involving the same account.

Copenhagen-based Danske Bank is using intelligent video to help with its AML efforts. Its solution alerts fraud investigators to transactions involving withdrawals just below the daily threshold limit and high-value withdrawals from newly activated accounts. Because all transactions are associated with video, it uses its system to verify the identity of the person conducting the transaction.

Video can help with compliance monitoring in other areas as well, including ensuring dual control procedures are being followed during cash handling and ensuring employees are following the proper protocol during branch openings and closings.

For security and asset protection – Video surveillance will continue to be a core component of most financial institutions’ corporate security plans; but intelligent video solutions can go beyond simply recording incidents as they occur. For example, a combination of video, presence detection analytics and transaction data can help proactively flag possible incidents of ATM skimming installation or cash harvesting.

Gorham Savings Bank in the US uses its intelligent video in just this way. Through its solution, the bank can tell if the same person is standing at its bank machines conducting multiple transactions with different cards, a possible sign of fraud. Bank investigators can then pull up the video associated with these transactions to investigate what occurred.

Intelligent video can also help quickly track down suspects of other crimes. For example, when a licence plate recognition analytic is integrated with video it can enable a fraud investigator to search for all instances where a criminal with an identified licence plate visited its locations. And a solution that marries video with RFID data offers banks a very efficient way to track items such as money bags, valuable artwork or antiques – making it possible to identify the exact time an item went missing and then review the video to see what happened and who was involved.

As you can see, banks are using intelligent video in a myriad of ways to improve security, reduce risk and gather valuable business intelligence. Integrating analytics with video and data is a smart way for banks to improve returns on their technology investment and a growing number of financial institutions are adopting these solutions to keep ahead of the competition.

By Dan Cremins, Global Leader of Product Management, March Networks