Remote Monitoring for Banks and Financial Service Providers
The COVID-19 pandemic has created unprecedented challenges for all industries, and the financial services sector is no different. Banks and non-bank financial service providers have been forced to adapt in the span of a few weeks while maintaining operational efficiency and compliance program efficacy. In addition, social distancing has made working in close quarters difficult and local restrictions have forced many locations to operate at a limited capacity.
One strategy—and powerful solution—comes in the form of video surveillance. To defend against opportunistic crime such ATM fraud, both banks and financial service providers must maintain visibility into their sites with limited onsite personnel.
In this article, we will explore some of those related issues and how financial services firms can use remote monitoring technology, along with other modern security camera features, to overcome these pain points.
Specifically, some of the challenges and use cases for video surveillance include:
- ATM Fraud and Theft Prevention: Mitigating the heightened risk of crime, ATM fraud, and theft
- Lack of Visibility and Remote Access: Operating with limited or no offsite visibility, including gaps in coverage and no clear view of key areas
- Efficiency and Incident Response Time: Managing an inefficient and unreliable footage retrieval and sharing process
- Limited On-Site Personnel: Operating with reduced staff
- Multi-Site Management: Protecting property, assets, customers, and personnel across multiple sites or locations
- New Protocol Compliance: Ensuring employee safety, maintaining compliance with social distancing, and mitigating the spread of COVID-19
- Limited Network Bandwidth: Confronting network constraints and concerns over bandwidth consumption
In facing these challenges, certain security camera system features offer significant advantages and help facilitate a more seamless deployment.
1. ATM Fraud and Theft Prevention
More than companies in almost any other industry, banks understand the vital importance of preventing fraud and theft. This only becomes more critical in a down economy and remote video cameras can assist any financial institution that needs to safeguard its brick-and-mortar locations, funds, and accounts.
- Live Video Sharing: While many traditional CCTV security camera systems that rely on centralized NVRs and DVRs require users to be onsite to retrieve footage, modern solutions offer remote access and live video sharing features. It can be as easy as sending an SMS text message with a live link to team members or even law enforcement if the threat warrants it. In situations where rapid response time is critical, speed and efficiency can make all the difference.
- Smart Search Filters & People Analytics: Modern, advanced surveillance capabilities—including Smart Search Filters and People Analytics—allow you to gather evidence rapidly and escalate incidents in real-time. With the ability to detect and compare faces in the frame, for example, People Analytics will immediately reveal when an unauthorized person is on-site and potentially up to no good.
2. Lack of Visibility and Remote Access
With normal operations disrupted, many banks are now facing a situation in which they have limited—or no—visibility of their physical premises. This strains operations and creates major security challenges. But we are fortunately in an era when technology and remote video camera access offers a powerful alternative to help keep everything on course.
- Remote Monitoring: The ability to access camera feeds remotely is an essential component of any modern video camera security system. Because you can instantly view surveillance feeds through a mobile app or web-based browser platform, it is easy to keep tabs on any location from afar. And in most cases, remote monitoring is available both in real time or when reviewing archived footage. Such capabilities make it easy to maintain visibility into all your sites—even in unprecedented times.
- Remote Management: Beyond simply monitoring camera feeds, remote management offers even more control from afar. With a centralized management system—including features like map view and floor plans—administrators can easily maintain visibility across multiple locations through a single platform. This can allow regional managers, executives at HQ, or anyone within the enterprise with access to ensure that the system is operating properly even while the bank is operating at a reduced capacity.
3. Efficiency and Incident Response Time
Overall efficiency remains a key goal even in strange times. While most banks look toward software solutions and ERPs for these aims, remote video surveillance solutions can support this objective as well. Modern video camera systems offer robust and easy-to-use platforms that give you real-time visibility that can be used for much more than just surveillance.
- Heat Maps and Motion Plotting: Real-time Heatmaps offer powerful insight into all motion across the floor plan. This allows you to have a better understanding of where your personnel—and customer —are at any given time and can reveal useful insight about how the space is being utilized. And beyond the efficiency gains that can be realized by analyzing these trends, Motion Plotting can help identify high-traffic areas that allow you to maintain social distancing compliance. Site managers can instantly see where people are gathering and ensure that crowds aren’t exceeding established capacity limits.
4. Limited On-Site Personnel
Now that social distancing is the new normal, banks may need to find ways to maintain security standards even when fewer people are physically present. Video surveillance can help fill the gap by allowing you to know what is happening onsite even if you are forced to reduce personnel.
- Proactive Alerts: Surveillance systems with proactive alerts can notify you the moment an incident begins occurring in frame. This is especially useful when it comes to protecting vulnerable areas like entryways or easily-accessible windows. By setting up motion alerts or tamper alerts, for example, you can rest assured that you will get a message as soon as something out of the ordinary happens — even if nobody witnesses it first hand.
- Multi-User Provisioning: To maintain security at any bank, you must restrict system access to only the right stakeholders. This applies to surveillance as much as other key systems—and it can easily be accomplished by creating custom user permissions based on sites and roles. For especially sensitive areas, permissions can even be established so that users can only access camera live streams (with no option to access past footage, save snapshots, or share video to a third-party).
5. Multi-Site Management
Coordination across locations, regions, or even the entire enterprise is vital to overall operational efficiency. This is even more true today and remote video surveillance has a role to play in keeping things as close to normal as possible. With fewer boots on the ground, every little bit helps when you simply must protect property, assets, and personnel at every location.
- Plug-and-Play Installation: Unlike complex and outdated analog systems, modern IP hybrid-cloud security cameras are essentially ready to go out of the box. They don’t require extensive planning, IT strategizing, logistical staging, or wiring to set up. Installation is a breeze, and this makes it simple to customize your configuration and camera array to any physical setting.
- Expansion and Scalability: To comply with work from home mandates and social distancing requirements, you may be limiting onsite personnel. One way to fill the gap is by adding extra cameras to an existing system. With plug-and-play devices that are easy to install, easy to deploy, and easy to scale, this can be done in no time with minimal disruption and onsite labor.
6. New Protocol Compliance
In the era of coronavirus, banks must comply with a range of new local ordinances, federal guidelines, and company policies for protecting public health. Video surveillance can help. Not only will remote access video cameras allow you to monitor locations staffed by fewer people, but they can help ensure that new policies are being followed.
- Crowd Notifications and Motion-Based Alerts: Social distancing measures now often limit the number of people allowed in facilities at any one time. Even many essential organizations have set 6 feet as the minimum distance that people must maintain between one another. A surveillance system with Crowd and Motion-Based Notifications provides real-time alerts when more than a certain number of people are detected in-frame. This allows site managers to proactively monitor physical spaces for overcrowding, easily assess the scene, and ensure protocol compliance.
7. Limited Network Bandwidth
Bandwidth is always at a premium. This is why organizations need a predictable and efficient video surveillance solution that doesn’t monopolize all the available resources — especially when so many operations have shifted online.
- Low-Bandwidth Usage: Given all the resource demands at any bank, you don’t want your surveillance system taking up more bandwidth than necessary. With a proper modern setup, you can limit network stress at 5-20 kb/s per camera—and be sure that you still have capacity available for other critical systems.
- Cradlepoint and Low-Bandwidth Support: One option favored by some organizations is connecting through a Cradlepoint router. This can be easily achieved with the right system—and you can even scale cameras using cellular connectivity or limited network bandwidth. If this is the best method for you, setting it all up is as easy as following a few simple steps.
- Hybrid Cloud Architecture: Cloud-connected IP cameras have changed the area of video surveillance, and hybrid cloud options can take it to the next level. Continuous cloud uploads can be a drain on bandwidth and resources. But a blend of onboard storage and thumbnail uploads offers the security and other benefits of maintaining everything offsite while not consuming vast amounts of bandwidth.
Surveillance Solutions
Discover how banks and financial service providers across the nation are utilizing video security, explore some customer stories.
Alternatively, learn more about the different types of remote monitoring systems with A Guide to Remote Video Monitoring.