Innovative Branch Transformation with Video Analytics

Branch transformation is a currently a common buzzword in the financial industry. As consumer preferences continue to evolve, financial institutions are continuing to enhance retail branches. Branch transformation is centered on creating an improved customer experience. One important aspect of this process is meeting the needs of existing customers that desire to maintain the traditional method of banking, while also catering to the desires of the increasingly digital consumer. The second element involves new, self-service technology that can replace tellers and improve customer service sales results.

As a result, the need to learn more about the customer’s needs, behavior, and habits has become very important and has also led to the inclusion of a variety of key stakeholders. These key stakeholders, although having different individual business goals, also have a common goal to provide a positive impact to their business. These key stakeholders include IT, operations, marketing, and physical security.

As one of those key stakeholders, physical security managers have learned that video surveillance can now be combined with analytics. Convergint partnered with Axis Communications can add these additional layers of technology to improve the overall customer experience. This solution includes security and safety, but with the addition of video analytics to help with decision making through business intelligence. All these items combined can not only help to provide business optimization but can ultimately improve the overall customer experience.

Video Content Analysis, also known as Video Content Analytics (VCA) is the capability of automatically analyzing video to detect and determine temporal and spatial events. The algorithms can be implemented as software on general purpose machines, or as hardware in specialized video processing units like video cameras. Many different functionalities can be implemented in VCA, such as video motion detection and video tracking. Check out this video showing loitering detection used to prevent two criminals from withdrawing cash from a number of skimmed credit cards.

While traditional retailers have been incorporating customer-focused analytics into daily operations for decades, financial institutions have lagged behind the technology curve; however, this is changing as the value is being realized. On the surface, video analytics may appear to be security-oriented, but with a little creativity can be applied to operational situations as well.

This is where physical security managers can play a pivotal role in partnering with other key stakeholders to enhance the overall customer experience. As many financial institutions look for the latest and greatest physical security technology to upgrade aging systems, considering additional ways to leverage their investment is a new reality. A surprising solution in this quest for branch innovation has been the use of network video camera systems. With the maturity of sophisticated video analytics, network cameras have stepped beyond their traditional sphere of security surveillance and loss prevention and into the realm of operational business intelligence.

Analytics can be very powerful tools to help financial institutions maximize value from their network video systems and gain deeper insight into their business. As financial institutions strive to be innovative, gathering valuable real-time performance data will be critical to achieving business transformation. Strategic use of video analytics will help not only leverage resource spending but will speed the process of making important business decisions and enhancing the overall customer experience.