Financial Services Video Production
Financial services video production has one problem to solve before any other, which is that money is hard to film. A bank's product is a set of numbers and a promise, and a lender's best asset is a reputation built one deal at a time. So the films that work in this sector are about people, the ones who work there and the ones who've trusted them with their money. The product sits in the background of their story.
A lot of our work sits in finance and payments, for a bank, a property lender and three payments companies.
What do financial services films need to do?
They need to earn trust from people who are paid to be sceptical. An investor deciding where to put money, or a candidate deciding whether to leave a bigger bank, has heard every claim a careers page or a brochure can make. What they haven't heard is somebody they can relate to explaining, in their own words, why they made the same decision.
That's why the strongest films we've made in this sector are built from interviews with people who aren't performers. They're investors and staff with no media training, filmed without a script, and the film is better for it.
Investor films for ASK Partners
ASK Partners is a boutique property lender that had always grown through word of mouth, with investors recommending it to other investors. It asked us for a video strategy that would bring in new high-end investors, and we built it as a funnel in three stages.
The first stage is a short film cut from the best moments of interviews with three of ASK's current key investors, made to be shared. The second is the full interviews, a film of two to three minutes for each investor, for anyone who wants to hear in detail why that person chose ASK. The third puts faces to the company, with a homepage film, short films with key staff and a film on the state of the economy with the chief executive. Short clips from all of it run on social media and point people back to the full films. The ASK Partners case study walks through the whole funnel.
Recruitment films for OakNorth
OakNorth asked us for a recruitment film while the bank was growing and hiring. We kept the crew small and spent time with the organisation before and around the interviews, so the people we filmed knew us by the time the camera was on. Staff from different parts of the bank were interviewed in the spaces where they actually work. The OakNorth culture film is cut as one argument for joining, carried by what they said. We've also made a customer case study film for OakNorth featuring Simmons Bars, one of its customers.
Fintech and payments
Payments companies have the same trust problem with a shorter attention span. For Paymentsense we made a testimonial with the Michelin-starred chef Robert Clayton about using its card machines in his restaurant. We also made a short film promoting its promise to answer calls within three rings. For Barclaycard we made a short animation explaining how its payments connect with Flight Centre, Amadeus and Confirma, which is the kind of relationship that's much easier to draw than to film. Our work for Dojo, the payments technology company, is on the technology and SaaS page.
Private equity
For private equity firms the evidence comes from the businesses they back. For Rubicon Partners we filmed portfolio chief executives and finance directors in Liverpool, Essex, Leeds and Nottingham for a who we are film and a testimonial for each company. The private equity video production page explains how those films are made.
Filming in a regulated business
Most films in this sector pass a compliance team before they can be used, and some pass legal too. We find out who signs off at the first conversation and build their review into the schedule, so approval happens on the script and the first cut, when changes are cheap. Interviews are unscripted, but we agree the ground they'll cover in advance, so nobody says something about returns or performance that can't be published.
Confidentiality matters on the day as well. Screens, deal documents and client names have a habit of ending up in the background of an office shot, so we check every set-up and keep a list of what mustn't appear. The crew is small, often a director and a sound recordist, and we work around the client meetings that can't move.
Related work
Financial services video production draws most on two of our video production services. Investor and client films are built the same way as our testimonial video production. The funnel thinking behind the ASK films is what a video strategy sets out before anyone films. Every sector we work in is on the industries page.
If you need investors or candidates to trust you before they've met you, tell us who they are.
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