With the coronavirus pandemic, it is clear that consumers will increasingly need online services. This scenario, in turn, should demand even more focus from banks, requiring a new and consistent step in their transformation strategies already started, especially today, when customers will begin to demand new formats of service and support in the virtual world. After all, the need to offer better experiences to digital consumers ended up forcing the emergence of a series of initiatives that, among other effects, ended up propelling companies in the banking sector into a new era, with their businesses increasingly based on software. .
However, in addition to opportunities to serve new consumers, changes in the offer model also ended up creating new challenges. The main one, without a doubt, is the need to deal with the frequent risk of ruining their reputations, due to IT failures. Research shows that, on average, organizations in this segment have experienced six serious disruptions caused by IT errors in the past 12 months. These failures mean customers who are unable to access their online banking services, who suffer from failures in mobile applications and who need to live with problems with payment card transactions, and are a constant reminder of the impact that poorly conducted IT operations have on our daily finances.
Banks need to ensure that their systems work perfectly for customers to use. It is not by chance that the UK Treasury Committee recently released a report assessing the gaps in the financial services sector, calling for steps to be taken to improve online offerings. The document considers that "the current level and the incidence of interruptions and damages to the consumer are unacceptable" and are resulting in customers "without money and with negative credit". With the number of bank branches dropping in the region - 17% less, since 2012 - ensuring that online services work perfectly has never been more necessary.
To prevent these failures from occurring, organizations must first understand the causes of the incidents. Among the main ones, undoubtedly, is the increasing scale and complexity of the IT banking environments. While working to improve their digital services, banks have migrated their infrastructure to hybrid ecosystems with multiple clouds, providing the agility needed to innovate more quickly. However, they still rely on a variety of legacy systems that are business-critical.
As a result, IT banking ecosystems have become highly fragmented, with hundreds of applications, millions of lines of code and billions of dependencies. Research shows that an average transaction - be it a customer checking their balance, a payment being made, or a bank updating user account information - spans 37 different systems or components. It is not for nothing that we are seeing an almost constant flow of problems - a single point of inaccuracy in this chain can be incredibly difficult to identify effectively.
It is still necessary to highlight the fact that banks rely on a huge variety of monitoring tools as they strive to manage the performance of their IT systems. This forces them to manually aggregate and correlate data from various sources to obtain a holistic view of the digital environment. In this way, there is a constant flood of data and monitoring alerts that make it difficult to interpret incidents quickly enough to ensure that customers always enjoy the experience they expect.
To protect themselves, banks must simplify their modern cloud environments to clearly identify the cause of any emerging IT problems and instantly understand the potential impact of any change in functioning to customers. They also need to fix these problems quickly, before errors and inconsistencies become a real failure of operations.
This, however, cannot be achieved just by improving traditional manual approaches to performance management: banks need a radically different way of handling information and alerts. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation need to be incorporated at the heart of this new approach, allowing to understand - in real time and comprehensively - the entire development of their networks, making teams capable of solving problems before these incidents are harmful to business and consumers.
Banks cannot really postpone implementing more efficient targeting to the way they monitor customer experiences and digital performance in their complex IT environments. Artificial Intelligence is the only way to unlock real-time information on application performance and actionable responses that IT teams need to quickly identify problems, mitigate impact to customers and improve their digital experience. Without the intelligence provided by Artificial Intelligence and automation solutions, banks will not be able to improve their resilience against IT failures, leaving them far from the necessary efficiency in these new times when being digital and online is the only way.
* Michael Allen, Vice President and CTO at Dynatrace
Notice: The opinion presented in this article is the responsibility of its author and not of ABES - Brazilian Association of Software Companies
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