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 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.

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Efficiency is the key competitive advantage in today’s financial services industry. More scalable training can drive down expenses. More engaging communications can help boost services revenues. More available and effective knowledge sharing can preserve employee expertise, provide a repeatable alternative to in-person consultation, and enable product and market experts to more profitably optimize their time.

In our latest white paper, How Video Delivers ROI For Today’s Financial Services Industry, we’ll explore how video is helping financial institutions become more agile — helping to scale training and communications while cutting costs, preserve expertise and identify business opportunities, and even enhance transparency with customers — enabling financial institutions to optimize operations and find better ways to capitalize on growth opportunities.