Optimizing Financial Services: The Digital Experience is Critical to Consumer Trust

The digitization of financial services has made tasks like checking your bank balance, buying and selling stock or managing credit card payments more seamless and accessible than ever. Consumers place a lot of trust in leading financial services institutions to protect their wealth and financial well-being. For the IT professionals behind the scenes, there is immense pressure to maintain security and uptime and avoid any missteps, all while delivering the end user a seamless experience.

As more financial services are being offered digitally, and applications and data workloads are migrating to the cloud, it is important that IT leaders stay on top of their digital ecosystems to prevent any glitches that could cause consumers to worry about their money and investments. The AppDynamics App Attention Index 2019 revealed 55 percent of consumers admit that problems and frustrations with digital services affect them more or for longer than they would like. This is even more crucial with financial services as consumers place a lot of trust in financial applications, causing any glitch in the service to weigh more heavily on their minds.

To get ahead of any issues that may cause trouble for users, IT departments should consider the use of AIOps -- the application of A.I. and machine learning to IT operations -- which can help automate performance tracking, monitor application performance and identify bottlenecks or outages and provide insights on how to achieve the most from applications.

How can AIOps help?

• Get ahead of the issue: The App Attention Index also found 83 percent of customers are likely to experience problems with digital services without notifying the brand and giving them a chance to make things right. Minimize the crashes your end users are experiencing and avoid being left in the dark on these potential issues with an AIOps strategy. By automatically finding and tending to a problem, it is less likely the end user will even notice there was a headache to begin with.

• Improved speed: Standard applications in finance tend to be slow due to the amount of data and level of security needed to operate in the industry, which can oftentimes also lead to crashes. Without methods like AIOps, bottlenecks must be manually identified and addressed, sometimes only to be followed by trial-and-error processes to determine the issue. AIOps automates this course and helps see what may be coming by constantly monitoring each piece of data and process to immediately diagnose any damage, shortening the mean time to repair (MTTR) and restoring service to the end user.

• Enhanced visibility: As more financial transactions are completed through applications, companies are under more pressure to deliver seamless digital experiences to consumers who are used to all their apps “just working.” IT departments are left to sort out how to meet these demands across large ecosystems and multiple platforms. AIOps can offer enhanced visibility across workloads and applications, allowing for IT workers to more easily review and gain insights and deliver and expected experience.

• Reduced costs and redirected sources: AIOps also allows IT professionals to automate tasks and monitoring so they can use their time and resources in more innovative and critical areas. AppDynamics recently surveyed 1,000 IT professionals around the world in the Agents of Transformation Report 2020 and found that 61 percent of technologists feel under more pressure at work than ever before due to the current pandemic. Without having to monitor each application and resolve issues manually, IT resources can be relieved of some of that pressure. The insights retrieved through implementing AIOps can help find and reduce any wasteful consumption of resources.

Financial services are the backbone of goods and services in the digital world, and maintaining strict adherence to regulations while ensuring customer satisfaction is the winning combination. AIOps is a worthy investment that provides visibility and efficiency across the entire environment. As found in the App Attention Index, 66 percent of consumers claim they would avoid trying a brand known for delivering a poor digital experience. There’s no need to let spotty service or lack of trust diminish your brand.

By Steve Long, Regional CTO of AppDynamics, a part of Cisco