I love video as a communication media. The combination of sound and moving pictures so much more engaging and more memorable than text.

We wrote in our research last year about how we're starting to see video being used more and more by eBusiness teams as an efficient and effective way to educate customers about products, encourage sales and deliver customer service.

With the Academy Awards coming up, we thought it would be both fun and helpful to highlight some of the best examples we've seen of online video in retail financial services in the past year.  With the help of the rest of team, I've drawn up a list of our favourites in five categories:

Product marketing video
DNB's S for Savings Plan video (Norway).
PayPal’s future of shopping video.

Service marketing video
Commonwealth Bank of Australia's Welcome to NetBank video.
E*Trade's Take Control In 3 Easy Steps video (US).
Mint.com's 90-second overview (US).
Lloyds TSB's money manager video (UK).

Educational (‘how to’) video

An article in today’s New York Times entitled “The Exaggerated Impact of Bank Transfer Day” states that 214,000 customer opened accounts with credit unions as a result of the much ballyhooed Bank Transfer Day event. With as much media blitz around the event as there was as well as the rash of articles around Bank of America’s debit card fee situation, you’d think millions would have moved their accounts. We’ll that did not happen and here is why:

• Consumers choose banks based on location as well as fees. Fees are just one factor in a consumer’s decision to “bank” with a given provider. As much or more a factor is bank access – more specifically convenience of branches and ATMs. In general, credit unions have fewer branches and ATMs than banks and do a poor job marketing benefits like fee-free ATMs and co-op branches.
• Banks (and especially big banks) have the products and services consumers want. Credit unions are getting better but in general their account services are inferior to banks. Case in point digital services. Banks like Chase go way beyond the basics of digital services to include services robust transfer capabilities, advanced mobile offerings, and multi-touch point self service. Credit Unions provide the basics but seldom advanced digital services consumers are interested in these days.

We are very excited to announce the hiring of our newest analyst in the eBusiness and Channel Strategy team – Tiffani Montez.

Tiffani joins Forrester from Wells Fargo where she spent 20 years managing various aspects of digital strategy, implementation, operations and cross-channel integration across lending, investments and customer service.  Tiffani joins a quickly expanding team which includes Peter Wannemacher, Bill Doyle, Ellen Carney and myself in North America dedicated to eBusiness and channel strategy for retail banking, lending, investments and insurance.

Tiffani’s will focus on digital financial service technologies including areas like mobile banking, personal financial management, online banking, person-to-person payments, automated account opening, etc. Tiffani will explore the vendor landscapes for these and other areas to help clients understand about how to make strategic vendor choices, implement new technologies, and create a operational team to manage the solutions once installed.

Additionally, Tiffani will expand on Forrester expertise in the lending area as well as cross-channel integration to drive sales and service strategies.

Tiffani can be found on twitter at @tiffanimontez

Brad

A few months ago I blogged about how the UK’s Co-operative Bank had come top in our UK Bank Content & Functionality Benchmark. The bank has now done it again by coming top in our 2010 European Bank Customer Advocacy Rankings.

Customer advocacy is the perception among customers that the bank does what’s right for them, not just what’s right for its own bottom line. In every country we survey in our Consumer Technographics® research, we’ve found that customers who view their main bank as a customer advocate have more accounts at their main bank, are more likely to consider their bank for their next financial purchase, and are more likely to recommend it to others.