Retail banking is changing and physical security teams are under growing pressure. Cyber and fraud risks are increasing, while teams are being asked to cover more sites, more data, and increasingly demanding business functions. Too often, this happens with manual, siloed investigation processes that simply can’t keep pace.
A modern approach to investigations needs to go beyond simply collecting evidence. It needs to give teams a clearer, connected view across branches and systems, built on infrastructure that’s flexible enough to evolve, so cases that once took weeks can be resolved in days. The following considerations focus on what helps banks build investigation capabilities that are faster, more coordinated, and built to scale.
Build on open, flexible infrastructure
Banks and financial institutions often manage a mix of legacy systems, newer technologies, and location-specific requirements. A proprietary system can limit which devices and systems connect across the organisation, making it harder to modernise without losing infrastructure that still has value – and harder to give investigators a complete picture when systems can’t share data easily.
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Open architecture gives decision-makers more choice and preserves flexibility, allowing institutions to select the cameras, access control devices, sensors, and analytics that best fit each location at their own pace. This also ensures modernisation occurs in phases rather than requiring everything to be replaced at once, for example, video management across sites may be standardised whilst keeping existing cameras in place, then gradually replacing hardware over time.
Deployment choices matter too: some banks keep core systems on-premises at major sites, while others use cloud-managed services for smaller branches or rapid rollouts. Flexible deployment models accommodate different regulatory requirements, limitations, and internal IT policies. This enables banks to maintain control over performance, cybersecurity, compliance, and cost, and adapt at their own pace, while ensuring that whatever the setup, investigators are always working from connected, accessible data rather than fragmented silos.
Unify operations to improve visibility across branches
Managing video surveillance, access control, intrusion, and other systems separately slow down response time and makes investigations harder. Operators may need to sign into different applications, search through data in different ways, and manually piece together what happened. Across hundreds of branches, these inefficiencies can add up quickly.
This pressure on bank security teams is intensifying. In the UK, payment fraud losses reached £1.28bn in 2025, with authorised push payment fraud surging 19% to £576.4m – the sharpest rise since the COVID-era boom in scams, according to UK Finance’s Annual Fraud Report 2026. AI is compounding this challenge: in a recent BioCatch survey of UK banking and fraud professionals, 84% said AI had made fraud more sophisticated, and 75% said it’s now very difficult to distinguish genuine customer activity from manipulated transactions. As reimbursement rules and regulatory scrutiny continue to evolve, the operational pressure to investigate faster and more accurately is only growing.
A unified security platform gives teams one operating picture across systems and sites; a local team can respond faster to an incident at a single location, while a central security operations centre can monitor trends, support remote sites, and apply consistent procedures across the network. Furthermore, a unified system that creates a shared context also makes incorporating analytics or AI-driven capabilities more effective, further accelerating searches, identifying patterns, and reducing overall investigation time. Natural language search tools are increasingly part of this picture, allowing investigators to query video and access data conversationally rather than manually scrubbing through hours of footage, turning what used to take days into a matter of minutes.
Put cybersecurity and governance at the forefront
Physical security systems are connected to the broader IT environment, meaning it is important for bank devices to be managed as part of the bank’s cyber risk profile. Inconsistent or outdated systems create exposure and severely slow investigations down due to inadequate evidence quality from systems which aren’t properly maintained. When cybersecurity and governance are a foundational part of the system, encryption, authentication, user permissions, system updates, audit trails, retention policies, and privacy controls are applied consistently across locations.
A centralised approach makes this consistency sustainable and provides accountability for banks, helping teams to keep track of who accessed which systems, who changed permissions, how long video is retained, and how evidence is shared – all of which matters when evidence needs to hold up for regulators or law enforcement.
Automate workflows for better risk mitigation and investigations
Investigations often involve information from several systems and locations. A suspicious ATM transaction may need to be matched with video, or an access event may need to be reviewed alongside intrusion activity. If that information sits in separate systems, investigations take longer and are harder to document.
Unified systems connect the relevant context across video, access control, licence plate recognition, and other systems. This supports faster investigations and helps teams share evidence internally or with law enforcement while maintaining chain of custody. For multi-branch institutions, this matters even more: connecting context across regions means teams can identify patterns and links between incidents at different sites, something that’s nearly impossible when each branch investigates in isolation.
As banks modernise their investigation processes, speed and accuracy will depend on foundational choices. Strategies based on open architecture, deployment flexibility, unification, automation, and cybersecurity governance all help financial institutions cut investigation timelines from months to days, while keeping evidence and decisions properly connected from initial report through to case closure.
Karl Pardoe, Account Executive, Genetec
