Maintaining a Positive Balance: Managing Both Performance and User Experience at Leading Banks

There is no shortage of digital transformation (DX) projects and rapidly evolving trends in the banking and financial services industry. For example, in 2024 many banks already have begun focusing on their risk-management strategies and rapid automation efforts.

It is natural for leading banks to become focused on efforts to modernize and stay ahead of the curve—but it could be at the expense of their foundation, which may fall to the wayside in the process of change. Because reliability and trust go hand in hand as top priorities in the banking industry, customer retention and loyalty are likely to falter if cracks in the foundation reveal themselves. These cracks often emerge in the form of performance outages or degradations in user experience quality. On top of the cost of downtime—estimated to be about $9,000 for just one minute—banks must also consider the potential revenue lost from customer attrition and brand damage resulting from negative press and media attention.

Consumers in the Digital Age

Constant availability and optimal performance of networks and business-critical applications from anywhere at any time is essential for banks to be competitive in this high-stakes industry. But in today’s digital world, reliable performance itself is not enough. Because the modern consumer is digitally savvy, expectations for seamless user experiences have increased. IT teams must strike the right balance between monitoring performance and user experience quality throughout the consumer’s banking journey. In fact, a recent survey by Fractal of more than 3 million banking customer interactions found that friction was the cause for 70 percent of abandoned digital journeys. Furthermore, consumer research done by Salesforce reveals that 80 percent of customers say the experience a company provides “is as important as its products and services.”

Performance and User Experience Monitoring for Banks

The increasing importance of providing high-quality user experiences makes it essential for IT teams to be able to verify and test user experience from anywhere at any time. Because of this, the ability to leverage a comprehensive solution that combines packet-based performance monitoring with synthetic testing for user experience insights has become quite valuable for banks in today’s digital age. NETSCOUT’s patented Adaptive Service Intelligence (ASI) Smart Data enables the most competitive banks in the industry to harness the power of comprehensive visibility that extends to their essential business edges—from the client to the cloud and from data centers to remote offices and beyond. Using scalable deep packet inspection (DPI), IT teams can achieve early warning, streamlined troubleshooting, faster mean time to repair (MTTR), and user experience assurance. This gives them a holistic, vendor-agnostic view into network and application performance while simultaneously monitoring user experience quality in any environment.

Without comprehensive visibility in place throughout their infrastructure, banks will be paying top dollar to recover from performance outages and poor-quality user experiences that negatively impacted their employees and customers. Insight and analytics from NETSCOUT Smart Data empower IT teams at leading banks to extract real-time packet-based intelligence from the noise of daily traffic to maintain performance and business continuity while also assuring positive user experiences.

As banks continue to undergo DX initiatives impacting their headquarters and branch banks with MPLS, SD-WAN, and SASE, as well as the critical use of software-as-a-service (SaaS), unified-communications-and-collaboration (UC&C), and unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) technologies, IT teams must prioritize continuous monitoring of traffic passing through remote offices, the internet, the data center, and other locations. Eliminating blind spots using end-through-end visibility from NETSCOUT instrumentation helps the IT and network operations (NetOps) teams at leading banks effectively manage and monitor both performance and user experience. By maintaining a positive balance when managing these two areas simultaneously, NETSCOUT’s nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solutions help these IT teams keep their banks out of the red.

Learn more about how this large European bank worked with NETSCOUT experts to restore application performance and assure user experience by using nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solutions to combat a persistent outage.