Mortgage Choice does Vidyo conferences

Mortgage Choice has been running a Vidyo videoconferencing network from Evidence technology over the last four to five months, enabling the company to reduce meetings between state locations and the group office from monthly to quarterly intervals.

A video conferencing system similar to that Mortgage Choice adopted. (Credit: Suzanne Tindal/ZDNet Australia)

Mortgage Choice is a national mortgage broker that has franchises — of which there are 360 — totalling between 1100 and 1200 users. The videoconferencing system has been built to connect five state offices and the group office.

Neill Rose-Innes, the chief information officer (CIO) of the company, said that the industry had experienced a lot of change recently, especially due to the global financial crisis.

"We're looking to be more efficient," he said.

The company decided that instead of having people constantly travelling between the state and group office, it would be more efficient if staff could use videoconferencing. It went to market looking, for example, at WebEx at the low end and Tandberg at the high end.

It settled on the Vidyo product after conducting a six-week trial, because it did "what it was purported to do" for a good price, according to Rose-Innes. It had fixed point-to-point videoconferencing, but also worked on desktops, which meant that videoconferencing could be used in the boardroom or by a franchisee on the move, he said. He also pointed to the system's ability to automatically adjust its quality to the network bandwidth available.

Over the months since the system has been in place, the amount of money that the firm has saved has been "meaningful", according to Rose-Innes. Monthly meetings where state office staff would head into the group office have been reduced to quarterly meetings, which when accommodation, flights and taxis are taken into consideration "adds up to thousands and thousands" of dollars, the executive said.

He also said that less time is wasted in banter before and after meetings. "The meetings get on with the business of meeting much quicker."

Training from the group office is also being carried out over the system, he said. The units were being used for about 25 per cent of each day; Rose-Innes said that this figure was more than expected, and added that he thought it would ramp up as time went on.

Staff didn't have an issue with using the system, he said. To make it as easy as possible, the company keeps the systems on all of the time, asking the staff to simply turn the monitor on when they start, and off when they're done.

"The system itself is 24/7 on," Rose-Innes said. "IT doesn't need to be involved. We found this to be easiest."

He said that videoconferencing had been around for a long time, but that it had been "overly sophisticated and complicated". Now, it is easy to use and is ready to be used at a desktop level.

For less formal conversations, staff use video chat via Google Apps, which Mortgage Choice moved to in late 2009.