3VR protects Denali Alaskan Credit Union

Customer profile

Denali Alaskan Federal Credit Union (Denali Alaskan) is a federally chartered financial institution serving more than 56,000 Alaskans and former Alaskans. The Credit Union primarily serves the communities of Anchorage, Eagle River, Fairbanks, Kenai, Juneau and Wasilla. Denali has 18 branch locations and more than 44 automated teller machines (ATMs).

Business challenges

Serving as a staff of one with additional corporate responsibilities, Kirby Milham, security director at Denali Alaskan, needed a solution that enabled him to drastically reduce investigation times. Denali Alaskan’s video search solution required Milham to actually watch video in real-time forcing him to often watch hours of video to find a fraudulent transaction that may have only lasted minutes or seconds. With weekly investigation times reaching upwards of 16 hours, time quickly became a scarce resource that needed to be preserved. “I needed a solution where I could go to the block of time where I knew an event occurred, see the faces or event I was looking for and then just watch that event,” Milham said.

3VR solution

Over the course of the past two years Denali Alaskan has installed 3VR’s VIP S Series compact appliance at four branch locations and will continue to deploy at all new branches and as a replacement for old equipment at existing branches. Milham has measured the success of his 3VR deployment in a variety of ways to include quicker investigations, reduced storage costs and the ability to integrate with any best-of-breed video camera technology. Denali Alaskan monitors for a wide variety of security threats from check fraud to bogus account openings to slip and falls to vehicle accidents in the parking lot to janitorial staff crime. “I have gone from investigating crimes for hours to seconds,”Milham said.“The ease of use has even allowed my branch managers to quickly pop in and pull data, which is a tremendous asset when you have such a lean security team.”

Benefits

In today’s economic times, IT and security budgets are lean for any organization. However, those constraints are magnified in a smaller regional credit union such as Denali Alaskan. As a result, Milham was extremely focused on the storage costs of his video intelligence solution, and needed to ensure that there were not be additional sticker shock after his initial purchase.

Designed to increase storage retention by up to 500 percent without purchasing additional hard drives, the S Series has delivered for Denali Alaskan. Milham has been able to store more than 200 days of video for one of his branches, a feature that he claims would have “doubled the price” of competitive units.

Future plans

Denali Alaskan foresees further aggressive expansion of video intelligence technologies to include:

• License plate recognition in drive up teller lanes
• Facial recognition to proactively alert branches when specific fraudsters with a record of activity at Denali Alaskan locales enter a branch
• Integration with 3VR’s CrimeDex database to better identify organized crime rings that often travel from the lower 48 states to Alaska to conduct two-day crime sprees across multiple locations, and then leave the state prior to the ability for authorities to investigate

In short, Milham is seeing the true promise of video intelligence being realized: the ability to quickly identify crime and apprehend its culprits. “We see a variety of scams occurring on a regular basis. The one thing they have in common is that the fraudsters always say ‘it wasn’t me.’ Then, we show them the pictures and the video and there is really no defense for them.”