Banking on Digital Transformation: The Growing Need for Comprehensive Observability

Banking on Digital Transformation: The Growing Need for Comprehensive Observability

Assuring reliable performance in the banking industry requires end-through-end visibility.

As banks increasingly face competition for market share from digitally native neobanks and fintechs, many have embraced digital transformation and new technologies to level the playing field. Innovation has been key to ensuring the best customer experience, which is essential for customer retention and attracting new customers. Banks today see technology as a means to enhance and refine a multichannel customer experience that encompasses online banking, mobile banking, and email and SMS banking, making essential banking services incredibly convenient.

Technology is at the heart of many banking innovations, including digital cards and wallets accessible through a customer's smart phone, incorporating generative AI into chatbots to assist with customer service, and embedded finance to expand customer purchasing options, to name just a few. At the same time, banks are looking to digital technologies to improve the employee experience as well in order to optimize productivity and enhance job satisfaction.

Delivering a seamless, modernized banking experience is the goal, but achieving that goal can be particularly challenging because of the increased complexity of networks and applications that now must rely on a mix of onsite and virtual data centers, colocations, cloud-based platforms, and remote facilities. All of this leaves IT teams with a considerably harder job when it comes to managing a layered infrastructure and ensuring the performance and security of these systems.

Operational Observability Is Needed All the Way Out to Remote Locations

One of IT's greatest challenges is assuring that essential banking services are accessible to customers and employees no matter where they are, day or night-whether in a regional office, bank branch, remote site such as ATMs, contact centers, or on a customer's smart phone. Customers need reliable network and application performance in order to consistently make deposits or transfers, withdraw money from ATM machines, connect with a contact center agent, or access web-based ecommerce applications. And business-to-business (B2B) banking also requires reliable performance-for instance, when executing debit card authorizations where a disruption can impact both merchants and consumers. At the same time, employees require reliable network and application access to complete interbank transactions, oversee payment processing, and collaborate with colleagues using unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology. Network and application availability is crucial for keeping employees productive while maintaining business resiliency.

Any disruptions to network and application performance can have significant negative impacts on the customer and client's ability to access their finances. This can do irrevocable harm to the bank's reputation and customer loyalty, which can snowball into customer attrition and lost revenue.

With so many services offered and such complex environments for delivering them, today's banks have numerous business edges to consider throughout their environment. This makes comprehensive observability crucial for reducing troubleshooting time and assuring performance and user experience quality for customers, clients, and employees.

Deep Packet Inspection at Scale Delivers Visibility to the Edge

Assuring uninterrupted network and application performance across the complex banking infrastructure is no small feat, especially when IT has limited resources and cannot be present at every remote edge. Without the right observability solution in place, IT can face an avalanche of trouble tickets from unhappy employees at remote sites who are facing disruptions to their connectivity. IT can then face challenges prioritizing and pinpointing issues at remote locations.

Deep packet inspection (DPI) at scale is the ultimate source of truth, allowing for continuous network and application performance monitoring across the increasingly complex banking environment, including third-party vendors and remote sites. Armed with this data, IT teams can reduce finger-pointing and accurately determine accountability to reduce mean time to knowledge (MTTK) and restore performance quickly.

Using scalable DPI, which serves as the foundation for NETSCOUT's nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solutions, banks can assess their entire ecosystem and gain packet-level insights from each essential business edge to streamline the troubleshooting process. By optimizing the efficiency of the IT team, banks often can resolve network and application performance issues before the customer or employee is impacted by the issue.

As the banking industry continues to invest in technology and digital transformation initiatives to make customer banking more convenient and to deliver a positive experience, minimizing network and application performance disruptions is job one. For IT, point tools simply won't cut it in these complex environments. DPI at scale is needed at each essential business edge to assure network and application performance. NETSCOUT solutions reduce mean time to resolve (MTTR), thus helping to significantly shorten troubleshooting time, which is key to protecting a bank's reputation and bottom line.

Learn how observability with NETSCOUT's nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solution helps address complex, multivendor, hybrid-cloud environments managed by banking IT professionals by listening to this quick 15-minute webinar, "Observability for Reliable Performance in the Banking Industry."