Thomson Reuters is to launch Reuters Insider, a YouTube for the financial industry, which will aggregate hours of video footage from a variety of sources, including banks, fund managers, analysts, news outlets and the company’s own journalists.

Reuters said Insider will take the video and online social networking revolution into the financial sector and would transform “financial programming from a passive one-way broadcast into a highly collaborative and personalised medium”.

The company said it had already signed up 150 external video providers, including Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan as well as major media outlets like CNBC, Sky and Forbes.

Banks and other financial services companies already produce hundreds of videos a day but they are often not distributed widely.

The service, which is only available to Reuters subscribers, (who pay as much as $2,000 a month for the privilege) allows users to navigate through videos sector, date, markets or region, or apply filters to create their own personalized channels.

Reuters Insider will produce near real-time transcripts of videos through voice recognition technology which will include highlighted search terms that allow the viewer to go to the exact moment in the video when the term is mentioned

Insider is part of a $1bn investment at Thomson Reuters, which is looking to differentiate itself from competitors, including Bloomberg, which offers a similar desktop node service for the financial sector.

The service also marks Reuters acknowledgement that professionally generated text — no matter how relevant—can not compete in the video age.