Captioning for Financial Services Companies

November 15, 2023 BY REBECCA KLEIN

Accessibility 101 for Financial Institutions [Free Webinar]


The finance industry has drastically changed in response to society’s reliance on online banking. Rather than visit a bank in person, people can open up their smartphones and check account balances, deposit or transfer money, and pay bills. However, to be a place for all customers and employees—including those with disabilities—financial services companies must create barrier-free and accessible user experiences. For companies that use multimedia, this means adding closed captioning for finance videos.

Why are financial services companies captioning finance videos?

Bank icon on a computer screen

To understand why financial institutions are captioning, it’s essential to understand how they’re using video in the first place. Financial firms can use video for external and internal content, such as for websites, mobile apps, social media, internal meetings, and training content.

  • Marketing: Social media has changed how companies communicate and market to customers. Social media has given financial institutions the capability to brand themselves as more than just a place to store and borrow money, and video plays an important role in many social media marketing strategies.
  • Internal Training: In addition to public-facing videos, many financial companies use videos for employee training. Captioning these videos increases accessibility and engagement for all employees.
  • Remote Meetings: If you’re one of the millions of people who engage in virtual or hybrid work meetings, then adding captions can be a great way to make internal communications more accessible for employees who are deaf or hard of hearing.

The two essential reasons finance companies captioning are accessibility and legal compliance.

  • Accessibility: Financial companies all aim to provide easy access to financial services. For many, accessibility is part of ensuring their services are usable for all customers and potential prospects. Over 5% of the world’s population has some hearing loss. As financial companies turn to video as a means to connect with their community, captioning their videos is a critical component of ensuring equal access.
  • Compliance: Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, places of public accommodation, including finance companies, are required to be accessible to people with disabilities. As legal precedent continues to extend the definition of “places of public accommodation” to the online world, finance organizations should be expanding their accessibility policies to ensure they have a compliant website.

What are Common Captioning Challenges Financial Services Companies Face?

  • Accuracy: For financial content that discusses stocks and investments, the wrong NASDAQ stock symbol could lead consumers to purchase or sell the wrong stocks. For example, CRNT and CRMT are both stock symbols that sound similar, but if the spoken dialogue states “CRNT,” but CRMT is captioned, consumers are likely to misunderstand the context and potentially make a different investment decision due to caption inaccuracy.
  • Workflow: Finding the right captioning workflow is essential for financial services companies, but finding a solution that meets their needs can be challenging. Finance companies publish videos through diverse platforms and, therefore, need a solution that can integrate with their workflows.
  • Cost: Finding a solution that is cost-effective without sacrificing accuracy is important for finance companies. The cost of captioning can vary from vendor to vendor, so finding a vendor that can work with you on price as you scale is important.

Read: Accessibility at Captial One


What Captioning and Transcription Features are Important for Financial Services Companies?Dollar sign with arrows

  • Caption Quality: Quality is essential for the accessibility of your content. Poor-quality captions can affect a viewer’s comprehension and meaning of your video. 3Play guarantees a 99% accuracy rate, regardless of difficult content.
  • Competitive Pricing: Ensuring captioning costs are within the allotted budget is imperative. At 3Play, we use a mix of speech recognition technology and human editing to provide high-quality captions at a lower price point.
  • Integrations with Social Platforms and Video Players: Integrations with popular social platforms for finance companies like Facebook and YouTube help streamline the captioning process for all content creators.
  • Live Captioning: As financial organizations continue to hold remote meetings, trainings, and webinars for customers, prospects, and employees, live captioning is important to help these companies provide accessible events and engage their audiences. At 3Play, we offer an easy-to-use solution for live captioning.
  • Support: When using 3rd party vendors, a good support system is critical to ensuring you are not alone against unexpected hurdles. At 3Play, you have direct access to an account manager, our robust knowledge base, and our support team.
  • Caption Placement: Financial media can often contain important charts and financial data. If any of this vital data is in the lower third of the screen, it could be obstructed by captions. By using Caption Placement, 3Play can assess the pertinence of text on the lower third of the screen and move the captions to the top of the screen in case the text would be covered by captions.

Want to learn more about accessibility for financial services companies? Check out our webinar Accessibility 101 for Financial Institutions:

This blog was originally published on August 27, 2020. It has since been updated for accuracy, clarity, and comprehensiveness.

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