Few industries have been impacted more profoundly by technology innovations then the world of financial services. Despite the risk-averse nature of the business, this critically important sector has embraced digital transformation (DX) in response to customer demands for a seamless, secure, Omni-channel experience, as well as the need to reduce risk, maintain regulatory compliance, and identify fraud patterns and trading activity.
Of course, making inroads in today’s digital economy has created a host of challenges for financial service IT departments who must operate in the face of outmoded infrastructures that create IT silos, service performance degradation, lack of insights and inadequate visibility, and a daily threat of cyber-security breaches.
Overcoming these hurdles so financial services organizations can take full advantage of real-time, actionable insights into the connections and service inter-dependencies between stakeholders, data, and processes is a high priority for IT. A recent study commissioned by NETSCOUT highlights the impact that DX is having on the industry. Fifty-four percent of survey respondents indicated that the main impacts of the increasing pace of change on the financial services industry are competition, which is now global, and new products that need to reach the market as fast as possible.
Highly agile fintech companies are leading the DX charge, utilizing technology solutions that rely on the immediacy of data in customer and financial transactions and integrating web, mobile, phone and in-person services to offer a more seamless experience. This trend is compelling banks, brokerages and other financial service businesses to focus on technological advancements for attracting and retaining account holders.
Evolving digital technologies are raising service delivery expectations and with the resulting escalating levels of interconnectivity required by these technologies, the need for service assurance across wired and wireless environments has never been greater. In short, outages or service degradations are simply unacceptable, and should they occur, they must be dealt with quickly.
To achieve service assurance, IT requires continuous monitoring and real-time analysis in order to rapidly detect and diagnose any sort of service delivery issues. This means IT needs actionable intelligence and end-to-end operational visibility of the entire IT infrastructure. Armed with this deep level of insights, IT can optimize agility, assure service delivery, mitigate risk and provide much needed feedback to operations, development, and business functions.
NETSCOUT delivers next-generation business assurance solutions that address the complex needs of financial services organizations’ applications, services, software, and hardware. We harness traffic data to help IT deal with resource constraints, disparate tools, IT silos, outdated processes, network complexity, and exponential data growth. NETSCOUT’s service assurance and security solution provides holistic visibility across the entire service delivery infrastructure from the wireless edge to the core to the data center and into the cloud. With our platform, financial services organizations gain essential visibility into the relationships and interrelated nature of the entire IT environment making it possible to more effectively triage service issues and maintain “always-on” availability.
For a more in-depth look at how DX is impacting financial services organizations, download the NETSCOUT white paper, Assuring the Enterprise in the Digital Era – Financial Services, by clicking here.
~Written by David Pitlik, Content Creator, Speechwriter, Technology Consultant