How To Choose A Personalized Interactive Video Platform For Banks

Enterprise Security A Must For Banks

Certifications That Ensure Data Security

Disaster Recovery

The video platform vendor needs to have a set of policies, tools, and procedures to handle disaster recovery. Oftentimes, the vendor needs to work with the bank to come up with a policy acceptable to the bank. For most banks, critical applications can have zero downtime or outages and are called tier-0 or tier-1 applications. Applications like mobile banking used to view accounts, make a transfer, or pay bills, fall under this category. Even if the video platform does not fall into this category, since it is a customer engagement platform, careful thought needs to be given so that video viewing is unaffected. An enterprise-grade video platform typically is a high-availability system.

Integrations

Most video platform vendors do not provide the required integrations, they just give you the videos and let you figure out the rest. Banks need complete solutions. For banks, it is important that the video platform is well integrated with their CRM and wealth management platforms. It is equally important to enable single sign-on for the video platform. In some cases, the video platform needs to integrate with the bank's delivery channels, that is, their email and SMS systems.

Scale

Can the video platform handle the stress of 1000's of people watching videos simultaneously? A robust platform is one that has done soak testing of its system with a typical production load over a continuous availability period. This is done to validate system behavior under production use. Load balancers should be in place so that the incoming web traffic for video requests is equally distributed and does not exceed the thresholds that the system can endure.

Another aspect of scale would be to see how quick and easy it is for the platform to scale up when more video campaigns or use cases are added. The platform needs to be able to generate 1000's of videos within a matter of minutes and not take 2-3 days for video generation.

Customer Support

Most banks often do need that extra help. Do-It-Yourself (DIY) platforms don't work for banks. A lot of banks require an on-premise installation and this means that they do need some level of support. The type of support required again depends on the bank's policy. Some banks require dedicated 24x7 support while others are ok if queries are responded to within 1 business day.

Customer Success

If a personalized, interactive video campaign is to be successful then best practices need to be applied. Applying best practices is not a one-time activity as there are new learnings with each campaign. A lot of banks do require that extra help in making their campaigns successful. That's where customer success comes in. They help banks achieve their desired outcomes for the video campaign.

The "Video Design" Aspect Of Personalized Videos

For creating personalized videos at scale, a personalized video template needs to be created first. Some banks do have in-house design teams, that create this base video for a campaign. But most often banks do require the video platform vendor to take care of this for them. The base template is then designed in collaboration with the bank's marketing team to ensure that the bank's brand guidelines are followed.

Another significant difference is in the type of personalized videos that can be created. Does the platform allow for real, rendered personalized videos, or are the personalization layers added on a base video? While real rendered videos offer greater creative flexibility it does have a few drawbacks:

• Is a downloadable file (an mp4) that poses security risks - the video cannot be password protected.
• Once downloaded the videos are permanent with lifetime validity.
• Are difficult to create in real-time.

A video platform offering real, rendered videos might be a good choice for a creative agency. However, for banks, the goal is to reach their clients and collect valuable feedback from them. Personalized videos just happen to be the channel of reaching out and not the goal in itself. For banks, it starts with their business goals that finally need to translate into measurable metrics for their personalized video campaigns.

Personalized Videos Data Source

Data is the core of personalized videos and a lot of times data resides in various systems. For regular monthly campaigns like video statements, it is useful to invest the time to integrate with the bank's wealth platform. Even over here, in the pilot or proof of concept stage, it's better to start with existing integrations, that is pull data from the wealth system (XML files or CSV files) and provide it as input to the video platform so that the pilot can be launched quickly. Once the bank is ready to scale, a custom integration can be looked at.

For a small campaign where there are not many data elements, or for one-off campaigns integrating with a data-source does not make sense. The video platform needs to provide simple excel/ CSV file uploads for these campaigns.

So a video vendor needs to provide all 3 ways of connecting to data:

• Start with existing integrations for the pilot phase.
• Work on custom integration between data platform and video platform post-pilot.
• Simple CSV/ excel upload for one-off campaigns.

A Knowledge Of Finance 

Last but not the least, banks will really benefit from choosing a video platform where the team working on the platform has an understanding of finance. A team creating a personalized video statements campaign with knowledge of XIRR and asset classes will create a better platform than the one that is only providing the software. In-depth knowledge of the business, process, and banking industry will help the video platform vendor not just be a provider of software but a partner in achieving the business outcomes for the bank.