How Financial Services Companies Use Real-Time Video To Build Trust and Reduce Costs

The challenge: Technology without connection

Financial institutions have invested heavily in AI, fraud prevention, identity verification, and cloud-native infrastructure. These are genuinely impressive capabilities, but they share a common limitation: They optimize individual processes in isolation.

The moments that matter most to your customers, such as onboarding, identity verification, resolving a sensitive issue, or closing a complex transaction, still require a level of human interaction that no automated workflow can fully replace. And the numbers confirm the gap: 64% of banking customers prefer in-person help for complex or sensitive interactions, even as branches close and digital channels become the default for everyday tasks.

Is your tech stack up to the challenge of delivering connected experiences that are coherent, compliant, and human? 

Why real-time video is becoming strategic infrastructure

Communication technology is no longer an implementation detail selected at the end of a product cycle. For financial institutions, tech is now part of the core infrastructure, the connective layer between your systems, your teams, and your customers.

The market reflects this shift. Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI) are the dominant segments in the global CPaaS market, leading all verticals in adoption of secure, real-time communication platforms. The Remote KYC Video Verification market alone is growing at a 16.8% compound annual growth rate, from $1.9 billion in 2025 to a projected $7.8 billion by 2034.

Regulatory pressure is accelerating investment further. The EU Anti-Money Laundering Regulation (AMLR), which takes effect July 2027, creates mandatory, time-bound compliance cycles that require financial institutions to act now, not later. 

High-impact use cases for financial services

Here are the five most common ways financial institutions are embedding real-time video directly into their workflows today:

• Remote KYC and identity verification: Live, agent-assisted video sessions allow compliance teams to verify customer identity in real time, with tamper-proof recording, consent capture, and a full audit trail. Businesses using video-assisted KYC can reduce onboarding time by up to 80% compared to traditional methods. And the cost of slow onboarding is real: 70% of financial institutions globally lost clients in 2025 due to inefficient onboarding, the highest rate ever recorded.
• Virtual financial advisory sessions: Wealth managers, mortgage advisors, and insurance specialists can conduct branded in-app video consultations without sending customers to third-party links. Your brand stays intact, your data stays in-region, and your advisors can serve clients anywhere.
• Insurance claim assessments: Real-time visual assessments via video allow claims handlers to evaluate damage, verify circumstances, and progress cases faster, reducing resolution time and lowering fraud risk without requiring an in-person visit.
• Loan and mortgage consultations: Guided, fully recorded video sessions support complex documentation workflows for loan and mortgage applications. Sessions are compliance-ready from the start, with built-in recording and retention aligned to MiFID II requirements.
• Support escalation from chat to video: When a sensitive issue requires more than a text exchange, agents can escalate seamlessly from chat to a live video session without disrupting the customer journey or requiring the customer to download a new app.

Key benefits for financial institutions

Embedding programmable video into your workflows delivers measurable outcomes across the business:

• Reduce onboarding costs: Video-assisted KYC eliminates the manual fallback process behind rising onboarding abandonment with KYC failures driven by fragmented journeys, poor data quality, and manual bottlenecks, now a top operational risk for financial institutions.
• Accelerate time to revenue: Faster identity verification and advisory sessions shorten the sales cycle for complex products like mortgages and wealth management.
• Strengthen compliance posture: Built-in session recording, consent capture, and audit trails support GDPR, DORA, AMLR, and MiFID II requirements out of the box
• Reduce fraud exposure: In-app video eliminates the phishing risk created by external meeting links. Meanwhile, real-time verification challenges address the rapidly escalating threat of AI fraud. 
• Protect and extend your brand: Fully white-label video sessions mean your customers never see a third-party logo during a high-stakes interaction.

Why Vonage Video API?

Vonage Video API offers programmable building blocks so your teams can embed video into any existing workflow without rebuilding your architecture from scratch. The majority of capabilities financial institutions need already exist in the platform today.

Key capabilities include:

• Session recording and archiving: encrypted, compliance-grade recordings delivered to your own infrastructure
• End-to-end encryption: optional AES-256 encrypted archives and in-region media routing across 11 global zones
• Consent capture and audit trail: built-in primitives for GDPR-compliant consent and immutable session records
• Fully brandable UI: no third-party logos, no external links, no broken brand moments
• Low-code and full-code options: from quick integrations to fully custom workflows to adapt to your team's capabilities

Vonage is ranked #1 for the Video Use Case in the 2026 Gartner Critical Capabilities for CPaaS and recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for CPaaS.

How to get started

Real-time video is no longer a feature to bolt on at the end of a product cycle. For financial institutions building the next generation of digital experiences, it's infrastructure — and the time to embed it is now. Explore more about Vonage Video API today.