Taking It to the Banks
Faced with economic stresses and increasing fraudulent activity, financial institutions depend on integrator partners to help them achieve a greater return on their security investment. Chief among banking end users’ needs are intelligent video management solutions.
Integrating Video, Transactions
One of the most effective ways to search video is to correlate it with information from other systems like teller transaction, ATM, access control and alarm systems. Increasingly, bank administrators are voicing interest in integrating video surveillance with their transaction systems. On a basic level, the integration of these two solutions provides operators with the ability to pull up video associated with specific transactions or accounts.
More advanced video management solutions take it a step further, enabling a bank to link a face or a license plate to a transaction. This provides your customers with a comprehensive picture of potential fraud. Video is only one piece of the puzzle: If banks are able to view the details of a person’s transaction, along with associated video, they are able to enhance situational awareness.
High Quality Video Is Imperative
Search and correlation tools only provide ways to pinpoint video. If that video is of inferior quality, it is still not usable. High quality video is a necessity in the banking vertical as access to superior video helps banks identify potential fraudsters and investigate security incidents more effectively. Inferior video has been proven to be of little use to law enforcement agencies, including the FBI. These agencies demand high quality evidence in order to be able to identify and prosecute repeat offenders, and recoup losses for your customers.
A truly effective banking system should be able to capture high quality data from any camera at multiple frames a second in order to provide sufficient evidence to convict in the case of a crime. But if you are collecting higher quality video, you need to maintain a system that can effectively store and manage the data and then make that data searchable across the enterprise.
Scalability is critical as banks expand branch locations, modify their existing business structure or merge with another financial institution. The minimum requirements for a scalable intelligent video management system include camera flexibility, enterprise health monitoring and enterprise search.
The industry is beginning to move away from its largely analog camera base and the ability to add IP, megapixel and pan/tilt/zoom (p/t/z) cameras in addition to an existing analog base will help your customers leverage their existing investments and migrate to newer cameras over time. To take the pain out of the transition, a video management system should elegantly support a robust variety of cameras.
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Easy Enterprise Management
Health monitoring is another key function no bank should be without. Banks need to be recording at all times to prevent various kinds of fraud and robberies. But how can your customers record 24
/7 if they don’t know if their system is working properly?
Automated system health alerts notify operators when cameras are malfunctioning and hard drives are failing, reducing downtime and maintenance costs. The presence of these automated alerts also help integrators reduce time spent dispatching technicians to a client site for a small problem, enabling you and your staff to focus on more pressing jobs or issues.
Since the landscape of the banking industry is changing, end users are looking for ways to centrally monitor their security system’s configuration. Enterprise-wide configuration enables your customers to set up rules, users and permissions across their corporate locations. This is critical for banks in today’s market in which users are frequently being added and removed due to workforce reductions and mergers.
As it turns out, enterprise management provides yet another level of value to customers: the ability to search across video from thousands of systems from a single location. When investigators can make connections between criminal activities taking place at multiple sites, they can build stronger, more enforceable cases that remove criminals from circulation for longer periods.
Opportunity Beyond Installation
Financial institution end users are looking to leverage technology to reduce costs. The cost of a surveillance system does not end when the installation is complete. There are administrative and maintenance costs, and equipment that needs to be replaced and added.
An intelligent video management system will help end users manage these costs by using some of the features previously mentioned – facial and motion search, transaction system integration and health monitoring to name a few.
It is paramount that integrators suggest technologies and services that will help end-user customers reduce long-term costs.
Stephen Russell ([email protected]) is co-founder and Chairman of San Francisco-based 3VR Security. He pens an industry blog at www.inhardfocus.com.
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