Financial Enterprises Can Bank on NETSCOUT Visibility

In the face of a network or application performance outage, time is money for leading banks around the world. And of course, in the financial services industry, trust is everything. When it comes to customers entrusting an institution with their finances, connectivity affects their experience, perception, and potential loyalty. In fact, according to a recent report, 57 percent of savvy digital-native millennials “express an immediate negative impression due to downtime.” The ripple effects of an outage are detrimental for banks, typically resulting in a loss of consumer trust and a state of frustration.

Five Performance Challenges for Banks and Their Customers

A bank and its customers may face many challenges stemming from performance outages. Five common challenges include:

1. Issues withdrawing funds, resulting in frustrated customers unable to utilize basic functions at ATMs.
2. Difficulty accessing bank accounts and information from online websites and mobile applications, which also may prevent timely bill pay or fund transfers and result in late fees.
3. Automatic payment processing delays, preventing transactions between customers and third parties.
4. Deposit delays caused by processing issues, often delaying the issuance of funds—especially on payday when payroll files are not transferred correctly.
5. Two-factor or multifactor authentication issues, which could stem from breaches or delayed delivery of push notifications or unique one-time passcodes to the users’ mobile devices, making them unable to log into their banking application.

Visibility Gaps Increase with Complexity

To make matters more complicated, IT staff often are not physically present on-site at branch banks. According to the American Bankers Association’s 2023 Consumer Survey Banking Methods Report, “71 percent of consumers prefer to manage their bank accounts through a mobile app or a computer.” This increases the likelihood of visibility gaps for IT teams that potentially are located across the world investigating consumer-reported performance issues.

Consumer banking in the digital age is quite complex, presenting IT teams with a myriad of challenges. One of these is the expansive infrastructure they are tasked with managing. Many banks have a number of regional or nationwide branch offices. They also maintain national or global ATMs, mobile applications, and web portals that each require connectivity to wherever the applications are hosted—such as private data centers, backup data centers, colocation sites, cloud, and multicloud environments. Pinpointing the true root cause of slowdowns and degradations to troubleshoot and resolve performance issues is increasingly difficult without end-through-end visibility across these complex infrastructures.

Another common challenge that increases complexity for IT teams is that the user community has even more choices in the banking industry today. Users need to be able to connect to any of the aforementioned environments, as well as to mobile or web services from any number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, over Wi-Fi or Ethernet, from home, work, retail shops, restaurants, planes—the list goes on. The expectation for reliable connections and consistent availability from each of these business edges makes visibility essential for IT teams to manage complexity. The ability to know whether performance problems are affecting a few users in one town or all users across every branch bank location or one access technology is critical for reducing troubleshooting times.

How NETSCOUT Solutions Help

NETSCOUT’s nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solutions enable IT teams to reduce blind spots and mean time to restore (MTTR) services, no matter where they are located. NETSCOUT solutions uniquely combine the power of packet-based monitoring with synthetic testing for network and application performance and user experience assurance. Early warning and streamlined troubleshooting processes help leading banks mitigate the risk associated with network and application performance outages.

Using NETSCOUT solutions, IT teams can continuously monitor user experience quality and swiftly identify the source of degradations. This way, they can work to correct the issues before users are negatively impacted. This helps ensure customer satisfaction and maintain trust—which is critical to retaining business in an industry where competition is fierce. IT teams can count on performance insights from deep packet inspection (DPI) at scale and use those insights to improve troubleshooting, eliminate blind spots, mitigate risk, and maintain business continuity.

By simultaneously leveraging NETSCOUT Smart Data to assure network and application performance and user experience quality, IT teams at the world’s most powerful banks can confidently extend their scope of visibility, wherever it is needed.

Learn more about how this multinational bank reduced MTTR by using nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solutions.