In the autumn of 2016, short videos began to appear in the streets, and the first signs of popularity were looming. In the same year, China's audio and video technology developed into a mature stage, increasingly supporting people's "online routine" -- things that used to require a trip offline can now be done at home with video.

Banking, which is closely related to ordinary People's Daily life, is no exception. In the past, to do business in the bank, not only need to ask for leave on working days to run, but also need to get a number to the branch line, time-consuming and laborious. Especially during the two years at home, offline processing is more inconvenient.

What to do? Remote video banking, born on demand.

Video banking, or virtual business halls, is actually not a new thing, but it has only come into public view in the past year or two. It is more and more familiar to handle business through the video connection with the teller, or the video due diligence, face-to-face signing, or video class and live broadcast of financial management.

On the surface, the no-contact approach advocated during working from home is undoubtedly an accelerant, but there are deeper reasons behind it.

Shi Haidong, founder and CEO of Flying Tiger Interactive, told Leifeng that there are currently more than 200,000 offline banking outlets in China. The cost of rent, security, equipment and personnel is very high. The annual cost of a single branch is up to several million yuan, and the entire banking industry spends up to one trillion yuan every year.

"A lot of that cost could be avoided," he says.

To be specific, on the one hand, the capacity of many banks' offline branches is not very high. On weekdays, the peak flow of people is usually only 1 to 2 hours a day, but the fixed costs such as rent and security have been consumed. On the other hand, the business volume of the network also has ups and downs every month. The completely fixed network distribution and the number of tellers will inevitably be stretched when dealing with the dynamic customer service demand.

By building flexible and convenient video banking, some customer service resources can be pooled and deployed to reduce comprehensive costs and improve service efficiency. At the same time, some offline outlets can be reduced, and the average capacity of a single outlet can be increased. At the same time to facilitate the C end, B end of the two main body, killing two birds with one stone.

In fact, the banking industry has always been at the forefront of information and digitalization due to its natural association with transactions and data. Video banking is also a natural evolution of the service customer scene.

More than two decades ago, when he was vice-president of Digital China, Mr Shi oversaw the first-generation technology platform for computerising bank branches. Now the virtual business hall is more like the "video version" of the offline network technology platform.

Years of financial IT construction experience, let Shi Haidong has a deep understanding of the bank network channel system and other aspects, but also let him feel early insight into the digital transformation of the bank and video trend.

Therefore, in 2015, when mobile video applications ushered in an explosion period, mobile data charges became cheaper, video security technology and 5G were rapidly developing, Shi Haidong and his team judged that there would also be major changes in the customer channel of finance, and video banking had a great future. In July of that year, Shi Haidong founded Flying Tiger Interactive, which began to focus on the video application of the banking industry and help banks to carry out the digital transformation of branches.

Will video banking be another "unmanned bank"?

In fact, the most popular transformation of the bank's offline outlets was four or five years ago, when "unmanned bank" was popular. Now, it looks more like an ideological enlightenment. After years of development, the bank APP has also entered the stage of integration and contraction. Digital transformation is never easy, but now the baton is being passed to the up-and-coming "video bank".

To use video technology to transform offline bank outlets, first of all, we should sort out clearly: what can be changed? What can't be changed?

In terms of categories, the customer services of banks can be divided into two categories: self-service and non-self-service.

The former can be used to deposit or withdraw money on ATMs, transfer, inquire and buy small amounts of money through mobile banking apps, etc. Such self-service transaction volume is large, often accounting for about 80% of the total transaction volume of banks. The remaining 20 per cent of non-self-service transactions are complex transactions that often require face-to-face communication for regulatory or risk control purposes.

It is this 20% of non-self-service businesses that video banking wants to reinvent. According to Shi Haidong, video banking at the present stage mainly replaces three scenarios in non-self-service business:

First, complicated business is usually difficult to complete on the APP alone;

The second is from the perspective of bank business security and compliance, which requires manual intervention.

The third is the business that needs interaction, consultation and guidance.

"These are the three most appropriate scenarios for video banking right now."

"In essence, video banking is a new channel business system with temperature." In Shi's opinion, online is not uncommon anymore, but compared with APP, text, phone, etc., video brings face-to-face and warm interaction. It is the innovative channel of video banking that perfectly integrates the convenience of the Internet and the quality experience of manual service.

As an early pioneer in the field of video banking, Flying Tiger Interactive has gained rich experience in the process of putting theory into practice.

In 2018, Flying Tiger Interactive created a 7X24 hour video "mobile business hall" for the Bank of Taizhou with many overseas Chinese hometowns. The clients of the Bank of Taizhou can enjoy warm and professional financial services anytime and anywhere without leaving home and in the hometown of overseas Chinese with time difference. 7*24 hours video "mobile business hall" has been well received as soon as it was launched. The annual business volume has been increasing year by year, and the estimated business volume in 22 years has been close to one million.

"Of course the pandemic is also a boost, especially at the regulatory level, to encourage remote contactless financial services to combat the pandemic." Now, video service has become the standard of banks, and the video of business scenes is an important part of the digital transformation of banks. The only difference is to do it first and then and how to do it well.

Flying Tiger currently has two core products: one is enterprise audio and video service platform; The second is based on the platform of "virtual business hall" application products. The two products together were Shi Haidong called "one horizontal one vertical" strategy.

He told Leifeng (public account: In the past, almost every bank purchased some video-related business systems, but most of them were purchased piecemeal. Today, a video is signed in person, and tomorrow, a video is double recorded. However, as the video business becomes more and more extensive, almost all businesses need the support of video capability, and a lot of independent video systems bought before are not only difficult to integrate. Nor can it support a wider range of scenarios.

At this point, banks found that they needed a bank-wide audio and video infrastructure PaaS platform to support the unified remote video of their various business scenarios. This is also the starting point of the Flying Tiger enterprise audio and video service platform.

After all, the real digital transformation is not a fragmented step by step, but a complete and long-term top-level planning from the very beginning. What banks need is not a "smokestack" fragmented system, but an integrated solution of PaaS+SaaS.

Shi Haidong told Leifeng net that this is a new product category and track, because of the depth of the video industry of important industries, the creation of product demand. At present, Flying Tiger enterprise-level audio and video service platform has taken the lead. After the severe test of the banking industry, it is continuously expanding to pan-financial industries such as insurance and securities, and even to energy, medical and other industries. The successful experience found in the banking scene will be promoted to more digital transformation industries.

In addition to the horizontal platform, in the vertical aspect, Flying Tiger focuses on the "virtual business hall", covering video banking, video financial management, video loan due diligence signing, video compliance and video marketing. In every field of banking business, Flying Tiger enables video business.

The practice of China's banking industry has been influential in the world. Flying Tiger Virtual Business Hall is also well received abroad, and has been harvested in Cambodia landing cases. Flying Tiger this "longitudinal", is deep into the banking industry, service the world.

Under the strategy of "one horizontal and one vertical", Flying Tiger has not only platform-type products, but also deeply rooted in the specific industry of banking to create excellent products for application scenarios. "It's a little bit like Microsoft, with Windows and the blockbuster Office app." Shi Haidong concluded.

Further, in his view, platforms and applications are "synergistic." If you leave the scene, the platform can't grow; Without a platform, the scene would be water without a source.

Both products do, although it seems to be "a little heavy", but in fact can form a good synergy effect, is a "fight hard, knot hard village" long-term doctrine and robust strategy.

However, if Flying Tiger wants to grasp both "platform" and "application", both hands are hard. In addition to its deep understanding of scene logic, Flying Tiger also needs the support of leading technology and good ecology. These are also the barriers to competition continuously constructed by the Flying Tiger interaction.

The story behind 99.99%

The offline face to face move online, how to "fidelity", becomes a matter of success or failure. Compared with offline face-to-face interaction, video interaction has many risks, such as video delay, black screen, the authenticity of remote customer behavior, etc., which directly affects the user experience and the compliance of financial business. Shi Haidong mentioned a few interesting numbers:

For example, in a video service, clicking the "Start" button is followed by a black screen, also known as the picture on time. If the screen is on for more than three seconds, 12% of consumers think the system is broken.

For another example, when banks carry out video business, they have high requirements on the retention of evidence in the video process. Usually in non-financial scenarios, the success rate of video recording is 99%, and no one studies it because the Internet is up and down. But a 99 per cent success rate means that one in every 100 transactions is missing the business chain of evidence, which is simply unacceptable for banks.

For another example, if the customer's hand covers his face, it cannot be confirmed from the chain of evidence whether it is the real will of the customer subject.

These nuances and sharp judgments of the industry are not solved by technology alone, but by in-depth study and understanding of the industry as a whole.

As an industry veteran, CTO Jiang Xukui, co-founder of the Flying Tiger Team, who developed ACE, a banking network business platform that occupied half of the domestic market, realized this early. The financial industry and the entertainment and social industry have completely different requirements for video and business processing on video. From the very beginning, Flying Tiger has been committed to deeply integrating video technology with the characteristics of high security, compliance and reliability of the bank.

In 2018, Flying Tiger met Tencent again.

On September 30, 2018, Tencent announced a structural adjustment and added the Cloud and Intelligence Industry Business Group (CSIG). Among them, Tencent Yunqi Innovation Ecology is CSIG's incubation platform for entrepreneurs, connecting the capabilities and resources of Tencent Cloud and smart retail, education, medical and other industries for enterprise service startups.

After the "930 adjustment", Tencent began to vigorously layout SaaS, Tencent Yunqi innovation ecology contact a lot of start-up companies. After a period of understanding, Flying Tiger Interactive established cooperation with Tencent in 2019, and gained the support of the underlying technical facilities of Tencent video, further raising its own barriers to competition in audio and video technology.

Shi Haidong back in recent years and Tencent cloud step by step in-depth cooperation process. In early 2019, Flying Tiger and Tencent Financial Cloud jointly developed virtual business hall; In August 2019, I joined the first phase of Tencent SaaS Accelerator launched by Tencent Yunqi. In addition to the technical support and joint research of solutions from Tencent, Tencent's strong business resources and capabilities enabled me to contact and serve many large clients in the financial industry.

The cooperation between the two sides started from video banking, first complementary technical facilities and industry cognition, and then gradually expanded to the ecological level. The cooperation not only extends to wechat mini program, enterprise wechat and other ecological portals, but also Tencent Yunqi ecology helps Flying Tiger to connect with more opportunities to reach customers and ISV partners.

Tencent Cloud has a strong audio and video infrastructure, supporting the globalization of wechat video, Tencent video conferencing applications, Shi Haidong told Leifeng network, as a Tencent cloud partner, Flying Tiger and Tencent cloud eventually reached a consensus: The financial industry needs audio and video capabilities that are different from entertainment and social networking. Tencent Audio and Video and the Financial FT team together created a "financial exclusive video cloud" for the financial industry, which is deeply integrated with Feihu's enterprise-class audio and video service platform, and promoted the video transformation of financial business together.

Through two-way complementary cooperation, the two sides continue to explore and reshape the industrial Internet era of production relations

To be a "product company" on Track B

In the past year, with the acceleration of Tencent cloud to "be integrated" transformation, flying Tiger more on the front stage, in the face of increasingly fierce industry competition.

At this point, banks found that they needed a bank-wide audio and video infrastructure PaaS platform to support the unified remote video of their various business scenarios. This is also the starting point of the Flying Tiger enterprise audio and video service platform.

Leifeng network learned that there are about two types of video banking manufacturers in the market at present, one is to do enterprise audio and video service platform, the other is to do financial scene SaaS application vertical manufacturers.

In the past two years, banks and other financial institutions have seen a surge in the demand for contact-free management, encouraging policy documents and industry technical standards. With a standardized and orderly industry development environment, remote video banking services such as virtual business halls have enjoyed a boom. Coupled with the gradual saturation of mainstream video circuits such as the Internet, opening up new territory has become a common choice for audio and video manufacturers. The financial scene is becoming increasingly popular.

"Last year, video banking had a market size of several billion yuan in China." Shi told Leifeng that although the market is not yet huge, it is growing fast. "The sales of Flying Tiger are expected to double this year."

As the racetrack takes off, the Flying Tigers, as the "natives" of the financial scene, will face more and more new challenges.

"It's a challenge and an opportunity." In Shi Haidong's view, compared with audio and video manufacturers, the relative advantage of Flying Tiger is that it has built an industry platform that can support complex financial business. Compared with vertical application manufacturers, such as video trading, video customer service, video compliance and other special applications, the advantage of Flying Tiger lies in that it can build a richer product portfolio of "one horizontal and one vertical" by virtue of the ecological advantages of Tencent Yunqi, and cooperate with partners in the ecosystem to explore the whole scene earlier and faster.

Not only that, in the opinion of many employees of Flying Tiger, Flying Tiger is a company constantly running in the customer's first-line business scenes, and can constantly dig out more video scene innovation together with customers, and many users' feedback is "keen innovation".

"Flying Tiger is a product company, not a traditional IT services company." The difference between the two in business logic lies in that the former uses higher product coverage To reach more scenes, colliding with customers to create more innovative ideas, hoping to develop more popular products To B, and then replicate them on a large scale and promote them to other customers and industries, thus forming a virtuous circle of "flywheel" effect. Undoubtedly, this is a more Internet style of play.

"It's a promising market." Shi Haidong told Leifeng that so far Flying Tiger has assisted more than 100 banks to achieve service model reform, and the customers cover joint-stock, city commercial banks, rural commercial banks, and even rural banks. And is bringing these practices and products and services to more industries to serve more customers. With the successful landing of overseas customers, "Flying Tiger will be committed to the development of globalization, so that global users can enjoy the new form of service born in China."