In the time it takes you to read this sentence, someone will have made another million in the market. And that holds whether you’re reading right now early in the morning on Wall Street in New York, at noon in London’s Paternoster Square, or late in the day along the Yangtze in Shanghai. Between the new realities of an expanding global market and continued advancements in automatic trading, not only does the market never sleep, it never even slows.

But the speed at which business is done isn’t the only challenge facing businesses in the financial industry today.

A series of broad and sweeping new legislation has brought forth a wave of rules covering capital, liquidity, consumer protection, anti-money laundering (AML), and risk management, making the regulatory environment perhaps more uncertain than ever. In the US, just over half of the mandates passed in the Dodd-Frank Act have actually been implemented, and many of those that have are already finding themselves revised again by the legal system. UK and other European institutions face similar challenges, as the Basel III rules roll out across the continent.

New regulation has also capped the industry’s ability to drive revenue with services costs and fees, forcing many institutions to implement firm-wide cost cutting measures and prioritize operational efficiencies. It’s a discipline that’s not without some danger, however, as today’s customer product and service performance expectations are higher than ever.

And on top of it all, the industry faces one of the highest employee turnover rates. A 2013 Hay Group survey found that 22% of employees in the financial services sector plan to change employers in the next two years—almost double the rate (12%) of anticipated employee turnover in high-performing companies across other industries.

So how are today’s best-performing financial institutions continuing to drive return on equity? As Deloitte has observed, “Technology is at the center of almost everything banks do in the areas of growth, innovation, compliance, and operational efficiencies.”

While many of the technologies now driving returns in financial organizations are proprietary specialized tools designed to address niche opportunities, there is one particular ROI-builder that stands apart — video.

Video is helping financial institutions become more agile — helping to scale activities while cutting costs, capture expertise and better identify business opportunities, and even enhancing transparency with customers.

Just how are today’s financial services institutions using video to deliver bottom line results?

Managing costs while scaling training and events

As an unclear regulatory environment and a still-recovering worldwide economy combine to dampen the potential for top-line revenue growth, many financial institutions are instead turning to cost management and operating efficiency to drive profitability. Here, video is a proven tool for scaling operational activities while driving down costs.

Introducing or expanding the use of video as part of organizational learning and development, for example, enables companies to deliver essential training information once — and make it available anytime, anywhere, for employees all around the world. This can offer significant savings over the traditional classroom model — for example, after finding that up to 40% of its classroom training costs were spent on travel and lodging, IBM moved half of its training programs to an eLearning format. In just 2 years, the company saved $579 million. Recording and sharing training events also frees corporate trainers from the burden of delivering the same session repeatedly to new audiences, enabling them to focus on new or more strategic deliverables.

Likewise, internal and external events too can be targeted for efficient scaling with video. Especially among larger institutions, events have become essential tools — with external conferences, seminars, and tradeshows hosted in order to reach customers, drive media awareness, and extend brands, while internal events help to build networks, identify strategic priorities, and showcase new product and service developments. Yet there is a key challenge to the ROI of any event — only those in attendance can benefit from them, meaning organizers must spend heavily to ensure their audience is large enough to generate value.

Here, video changes that break-even point by serving both as broadcast tool and as an on-demand library. Rather than relying on in-person attendance, financial institutions can use a video platform like Panopto to live stream a webcast of an event to an audience of tens of thousands — well beyond what traditional video conferencing tools can offer. And for the 55% of people who prefer to watch a video presentation after the fact, that same webcast video can be instantly stored and shared in a central video library where it can be easily accessed anytime. Event video doesn’t need to be expensive either — Siemens now records entire events with just laptops and webcams, delivering a significant savings over the old method of relying on a team of AV specialists.

Managing turnover and developing future business leaders

Central to the task of any organizational leader is ensuring the company has the right team members with the right skills to be competitive, and that the next generation of leaders is being developed for the future. It’s an especially acute challenge for the financial industry, as organizations attempt to develop talent and sidestep the brain-drain that comes with losing 1 in 5 employees every year to turnover.

The task starts with onboarding, where financial institutions are using video to extend the ordinary one-day welcome into an organized series of video-based lessons that cover everything from company culture to product details. Video makes it possible to curate and organize onboarding activities over an employee’s first 30, 60, or 90 days — and makes those activities consistent and accessible even for remote employees around the world. Best of all, according to research by Aberdeen Group, companies that offer an onboarding program have an average employee retention rate of 86 percent, while companies without one have a 56 percent retention rate — meaning video onboarding can be an efficient way to combat the financial industry’s high turnover rates.

Video-based learning and development can also enhance agility for staff and management. Because modern video platforms like Panopto offer the ability to index and search the actual content spoken or shown in a video, team members can use a central video training library more as a reference resource than as a memorization requirement — searching for the training information they need right when and where they need it.

And as employees are prepared to take on leadership roles, video-based training again can play an essential part by offering a means to provide consistent, organized lessons to the institution’s newest managers, providing them with a “digital coach” for everything from how to communicate company values, how to conduct performance reviews, and even simply how to use the company’s employee management technology. Developing this leadership expertise — especially in operations, technology, finance, and compliance — is essential to ensuring the future viability of the organization.

Driving innovation through social learning

It’s time to stop waiting for that next big “eureka” innovation that changes everything. Studies have shown that greater success is achieved more rapidly through steady incremental improvements derived from social learning. This should come as no surprise — even before the days of the Industrial Revolution, businesses have relied on employee’s institutional knowledge and subject matter expertise to find new ways to amplify productivity or create improvements to products and processes.

For organizations like financial institutions that make their trade in simplifying the incredibly complex, the act of sharing expertise or experience among employees can help demystify complicated regulations, allowing more employees to act quickly and with confidence that they are doing things properly. Likewise, social learning can teach more employees specifics of how incredibly sophisticated analysis tools or market technologies actually work, and in turn making it possible for new people to suggest new ways to further tune, optimize, or improve the process for even better results.

So where does video come in? As noted by the New York Times, video makes social learning accessible. Instead of sharing knowledge one-to-one, recording a subject matter expert sharing their insights on a regulation, product, service, industry, or anything else makes it possible for everyone else in the organization to find and benefit from those insights — even if the subject matter expert isn’t available or even with the organization any longer. A leading financial markets technology firm has used video to scale the knowledge of their experts — allowing product managers previously overwhelmed by customer and internal requests for demonstrations to simply record it once and share the video.

Enhancing the customer experience to enrich client relationships

Today’s financial services industry is awash with forms, reports, dashboards, and prospectuses. So much documentation can be a healthy means to offer transparency — but seldom helps a business stand out from the competition or engage customers in a meaningful way. Video offers financial companies a convenient tool to ensure their messages stand apart.

For institutions targeting other businesses as clients, video can be a transformative sales tool — putting a face with a message for prospecting, and bringing life to the static text of old brochures or reports. The numbers bear it out — up to 85% of buyers are more likely to make a purchase if they saw an explainer video first.

Video also creates communication opportunities for connecting directly with customers. Many businesses have found that offering a series of product explainer videos or recorded responses to FAQs engage new leads and existing customers alike in a way that 20-page brochures simply don’t. Likewise, creating generic welcome  video messages for new customers — walking through what’s in an investment portfolio, how to sign up for service online, which phone numbers to call for deposit confirmations, and other practical essentials — helps ensure customers feel taken care of as part of the buying process, and can help boost retention and referral rates for many client services.

Designing corporate cultures for the modern marketplace

In the wake of the negative public relations stemming from the pre-recession behaviors of a few members of the industry, cultivating a risk management culture that can integrate into daily operations has become an important objective of financial organizations big and small. Designing such a culture is no small task — and one that is even more difficult for larger financial institutions already challenged with finding an internal brand strong enough to unite disparate teams spread across continents.

Video enables financial organizations to bolster internal communications, delivering messages that are more engaging and more memorable — helping companies better deliver the mission and value statements they share, as well as help individual offices around the world connect with their colleagues and share how they work and the value they deliver. The effect is noticeable — according to Forrester Research, employees are 75 percent more likely to watch a video than to read documents, emails or web articles.

And not only is video a more engaging medium for communications, it can often be more efficient. Rather than require an internal communications team to develop and refine internal messages over rounds and rounds of document reviews, leaders in the company can simply use a webcam to record an idea or presentation (with or without accompanying slides), and share the recording instantly through the company’s centralized video library. And with user-level video analytics available from modern video platforms like Panopto, communications teams can even see who’s watching which videos, and which messages garner the highest engagement.

To Maintain a Central, Secure Library of Video Assets

No matter how any given financial institution uses video most often, in the end, nearly every one creates a robust library of video files in the process. Panopto is the only video platform that integrates best-of-breed recording and webcasting with a secure video library. All of your Panopto recordings and live webcasts are automatically uploaded into the library and converted for optimal viewing on any computer, tablet, or smartphone. Pre-recorded videos can also be uploaded and converted for playback on any device.

And as the video library grows, Panopto provides a unique video search engine that makes finding information inside your videos as easy as searching for content within email and documents. Simply enter a word or phrase like “financial services” into Panopto’s video search engine – you’ll find every relevant recording in your collection and be able to fast-forward to each point in your videos where the term is mentioned (click here to try the search yourself).

Try It Yourself!
Panopto is a video platform that enables you to create the right culture, support social learning and creative solutions, and scale operations while managing costs, helping your financial institution develop new efficiencies and find better ways to capitalize on growth opportunities.

To learn more about how you can use video in your financial institution, contact our team to request a free trial of our software today!