It’s always great to see old instituitons adopting new media (see my earlier post about the 10 Downing Street Channel) and South African bank, FNB, has become the latest blue-chip company to create their own YouTube Channel called FNBTV, which launched on 1 June 2008.

At the moment content is quite thinly spread on FNBTV with only 3 videos uploaded at present, but it looks like it will be the place to go to find all their advertising campaigns, noteworthy interviews and media releases. I’m pretty sure that this will grow over time and the 9 000 channel views it has received since launching gives some indication of the interest it has already attracted.

“FNB is a progressive bank and we are embracing digital media in a unique way for a financial services company,” FNB Media Director, Gisele Wertheim-Aymes, recently told me.

This is not the first time FNB has been at the forefront of innovation and early adoption. They were the first bank to offer an SMS notification service in 2003 called inContact, which currently alerts more than 5 million of their subscribed customers of all banking activity on their accounts — of which I am a happy user. They also recently announced another first in SA, cellphone banking for businesses.

Let’s hope that other big companies see technology as an enabler and follow in FNB’s footsteps.