Hi-Tech Urban Bank: The bank, located in one of the country's technology hotbeds, has been extremely successful in attracting and retaining techno-savvy individual investors with very high personal net worth. A key factor in the business was the interpersonal contact between the bank officers and the individual investors. Many of the investors proved to have computer equipment capable of executing H.324 conferencing. The bank wanted to capitalize on this to expand the frequency of contact between their personal bankers and the investors. The bank had existing PictureTel H.320 equipment, but it was unable to communicate with the H.324 systems.
The systems administrator selected the Viewpoint VBX� system because of its ability to interoperate with the customers' equipment. The Viewpoint VBX system was set up to allow the personal banking officers to make regular personal contact with their key investors without either party having to travel. As an additional bonus, the VBX System Codec Manager Software made it possible for multiple users to share the bank's existing hardware, greatly expanding the functionality of the existing infrastructure with no additional investment!
Large Regional Bank: This aggressive regional financial institution wanted to be able to feed live video data to the traders desks, improving their knowledge of breaking market trends. However, LAN usage was already high and the investment required to expand the infrastructure to a point where digital video could be added was unrealistic.
The Viewpoint VBX� system was selected because of its ability to feed standard NTSC video data over existing building wiring without impacting the LAN. The quality of the native-mode television data was a plus, since the traders typically maintained many open windows on their desktops. The bank believes that the addition of real-time video data has measurably improved the performance of the trading group.
International Bank: This large, multinational organization needed to be able to communicate between Europe and the Americas. With travel between sites taking up to fourteen hours, the immediate need was to improve bank operations by reducing travel time. The bank wanted to implement video conferencing as a way to allow a larger portion of the key staff to routinely communicate without the disruptive effect and cost of physical travel. An earlier implementation of video conferencing had proved an expensive fiasco when the system turned out to be too complicated for the average bank officer to use, and the organization was fearful of the perceived complexity of video communication.
The Viewpoint VBX� system was selected because of its flexibility as well as its ease of use . The implementation was completed within a month. Travel time was reduced as expected and the staff were pleasantly surprised to find the interface "easier to use than the *!#^@&@# international telephone system".
Small Community Banking Organization: This rapidly growing community bank needed a simple way for personnel to swiftly communicate between their four locations. As the organization was growing rapidly, a continuing need for training was proving extremely disruptive and almost prohibitively expensive as staff groups were forced to move between branches for training during business hours. A previous investment had left the organization with a legacy of NEC codecs that they did not want to abandon.
The Viewpoint VBX� system was chosen because of its ability to manage legacy equipment and extend its usability. The implementation allowed the bank to conduct training and meetings on what amounted to a completely ad-hoc basis with virtually no disruption in business operations.
