Video Surveillance in the Fight Against Bank Fraud

CIO — Fraud and other illegal activities are cause for major concern at all banks, and Israel's Bank Hapoalim is no exception. Identity theft and on-premises holdups are some of the more prominent crimes that come to mind when we think about threats, but smaller petty crimes often are more common and can have a surprisingly significant impact not only on a bank's bottom line but on its reputation as well.

In one such example of fraud at Bank Hapoalim, a customer had given the teller a large cash deposit. The teller, having counted the money, was in the process of putting the cash in the desk safe when he was distracted by a question from a coworker. As the teller turned to address his colleague, the customer simply reached over the counter and took back a portion of money, pocketing it.

In another case, a teller left his desk briefly, leaving a short queue of customers to wait. One of the customers from the queue stepped forward and grabbed a handful of new credit cards from a box on the teller's desk that were ready to be mailed out to customers with activation information. The customer, undetected by his fellow bank patrons, slipped the stolen cards into a bag and stepped back into line as though nothing had happened.

As serious as these seemingly small acts of theft were, there are crimes with far graver outcomes. Recently, an elderly woman was killed after being robbed by a man who fled the scene and escaped capture. He then used the woman's bank card to withdraw cash from a Bank Hapoalim ATM. While this story cannot have a happy conclusion, justice was served in the end with the help of video surveillance technology.

The use of video surveillance technology is a primary tactic for combating threats such as these, but to be most effective it must be employed in conjunction with other security measures like supplementary technology, information sharing with authorities, and widespread employee and consumer education.

The quality and effectiveness of video surveillance technology as a deterrent to crime or as evidence in solving crimes is often called into question. For Bank Hapoalim, however, the use of video surveillance technology has been enormously beneficial, particularly in providing conclusive evidence. Without high-quality video footage, the crimes discussed above would likely have gone unsolved, leaving breaches of sensitive customer data, identity theft and murder in their wake, and the perpetrators free to act again.

Determinants for Video Quality and Effectiveness
Generally, video quality is not an issue as long as high-grade cameras and a comprehensive video management system are installed. A decade ago, Bank Hapoalim integrated a digital video recording system from Visual Defence (the DViR) to record and manage all of its branch and ATM cameras throughout Israel, and has worked with the vendor to continually upgrade and customize the system to ensure the highest standards of security. The video surveillance system offers the bank several benefits, including a unique compression algorithm that allows video images to be stored at a very high quality with very minimal storage requirements, which helps cut overall system costs by reducing the amount of storage hardware required.

In our experience, the effectiveness of video surveillance is dependent on two variables:

• The way in which the technology is integrated with other systems to provide useful information and
• The manner in which an organization responds to that information.

The flexibility of the video surveillance system to be customized for specific business and security objectives is of major importance when it comes to having a system that will provide useful and relevant information. At Bank Hapoalim, our video surveillance system is integrated with the intruder alarm system, as well as with panic buttons. If either alarm is triggered, the system will send commands to cameras in the appropriate location to automatically start recording as well as saving images from a predetermined amount of time before the alarm was triggered. Those images, along with associated audio, are stored both locally and centrally.

Ease-of-use and customization capabilities also have a significant impact on video effectiveness. A digital video surveillance system, such as the DViR, with a graphical user interface (GUI) that can be tailored to closely reflect the GUI of the existing burglar alarm system creates a user experience that is familiar and can help increase rapid and efficient alarm response. For example, because our security operators were already familiar with the GUI, system training was completed in a little more than 10 minutes. Even as additional system features are added, the video surveillance system has remained very operator friendly, which continues to contribute to overall effectiveness.

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