Misys, Aviva, Marsh and HBOS are just some of the leading financial institutions already using its services to reduce business travel, increase communications lines, improve training, accelerate the sales cycle and assist with compliance.

"The financial services sector is emerging as a major adopter of web collaboration and conferencing in Europe," said Greg Brown, EMEA enterprise sales manager, WebEx. "The ability to collaborate remotely facilitates training, spurs the sales cycle and reduces the expense, time and stress associated with business travel. WebEx has already signed up eight of Europe's most prestigious financial institutions."

Traditionally, travel has always been a necessary part of business operations and the associated expenses, time and stress have been an accepted outlay. However, as technology has advanced many financial institutions are realising that by using virtual meeting technologies, such as remote web conferencing, these business processes can be streamlined.

Daragh O'Byrne, product marketing manager at Misys Retail Banking says the company has been using WebEx collaboration applications across its offices in 30 countries to communicate with customers in 101 countries. "Initially we implemented WebEx to reduce the travel expenses that our staff were clocking up. With customers and offices across the globe we needed a way to reduce air miles, especially in situations where product presentations could be undertaken online."

Since its implementation, WebEx applications now supports the sales function, internal communications and cross-office collaboration. "The ROI Misys Banking Systems experiences is excellent. If just one person conducts a web meeting instead of taking a long haul flight the service has already paid for itself. It is an extremely effective way for us to communicate, both internally and externally."

Aviva is the world's sixth largest insurance group and the leading provider of life and pensions products in the UK. Since May 2004, Aviva has recorded over £120,000 in cost savings from reduced business travel, thanks to WebEx. Following the success of an initial pilot scheme, the company has integrated WebEx into a collaborative working strategy globally, across the organisation. Using WebEx, Aviva has been able to increase the efficiency and productivity of meetings and improve internal communications within the organisation.

According to Tammie Crockford, project manager, group development, Aviva: "Since implementing WebEx, we have increased staff morale in those teams where frequent business travel used to be the norm. WebEx meetings have freed these teams from being slaves to road, rail and plane giving our employees a choice of when they travel and more control over their time."

Another benefit being provided by WebEx to its financial sector customers is assistance with regulatory compliance. WebEx Retention Solution records all meetings undertaken in Meeting Center, which are then automatically delivered to the customer’s network where they are stored in a WORM-compliant (write once-read many) storage system. The WebEx Retention Solution was designed with the evolving requirements of SEC rules 17a-4 and 17a-3, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and other legislation in mind. WebEx is the first and only web meeting provider to offer this capability.