The banking industry is facing its biggest transformation, driven by changing consumer expectations, a work-from-home culture, and born-in-the-cloud start-ups offering slick online-only services. Firms are navigating a new “always-on” relationship with customers and a much-needed move to open banking. Simultaneously, increasingly stringent regulations require banks to have even tighter control of their finances, security, and data.
To remain relevant, win new customers, and increase revenue streams, banks must redefine all they know. That means maintaining and modernizing core internal processes, ramping up digitalization to meet changing customer expectations and increase profitability. Read on to discover how banks can combine data, insights, and actions to run operations more efficiently, enabling faster, more effective decision-making that drives transformational initiatives to improve the omni-channel experience for employees and customers—all powered by Riverbed Unified Onservability.
Reimagine your banking systems—and run your bank better
The technology that quite literally puts banking in consumers’ hands also threatens the traditional banking models. To realize the full potential of their banking systems–reducing errors, improving application performance, and making staff more effective–these firms must reinvigorate branches and refine the services they deliver.
Primarily, this involves removing barriers between tellers and customers, introducing self-service kiosks, and supercharging their online and mobile offerings. However, a reliance on tech requires systems to operate as smoothly and reliably as possible. This is challenging when faced with huge volumes of data and legacy infrastructure that anchor banks to the past instead of propelling them into the present.
Thanks to unified observability’s automated remediation and self-healing capabilities, banks can easily resolve problems across their entire architecture before customers notice a disruption, thereby safeguarding the business’s reputation and building all-important trust among consumers. In fact, one of our clients used these tools to proactively reduce their support tickets by 20-30% a month.
By detecting and fixing problems faster, banks can achieve strategic optimizations, increase efficiencies, accelerate mean time to repair, and reduce time spent on non-critical issues. What’s more, they can eliminate alert fatigue, significantly reducing the number of notifications staff must go through, thereby lowering stress levels and turnover rates. This is critical during a time of talent and skills shortages.
Banks can use unified observability to simplify their setup, streamline operations and directly cut costs, too, by identifying under-utilized tech and optimizing networks, devices, and apps that are relied on the most. Another Riverbed client saved an estimated £600,000 on each application they examined using our technology. One more bank found they could avoid a $16M upgrade by maximizing the hardware they already had.
Reimagine modernization—and change your bank faster
Today’s consumers crave convenience, generally favoring the digital banking experience only apps and online portals can provide. However, even as banks’ physical footprints shrink, the in-person experience is still crucial and shouldn’t be underestimated.
With unified observability, banks can empower the in-branch experience by providing live reporting of ATMs and colleague operations, the same automated remediation tools mentioned earlier, change validation, and more. A banking client of ours found their remaining branches were working disparately, delivering different levels of teller service in each location. Using our tools, they could identify this and stabilize the situation to offer one consistent experience. Another went from having 1,000 employees working from home to 22,000 in a mere four weeks. They used our platform to gain visibility on who was working where and when and see which offices they could close–reducing costs without losing productivity.
As consumers navigate between online, mobile banking and physical branch, contact center or ATM visits, it’s vital that banks create a tech environment where each interaction is efficient and fit for future-ready, customer-centric, omni-channel banking. Unified observability platforms ensure that every app, across every device, within every channel consistently delivers and exceeds the level of service necessary to drive business, rather than hinder it.
Reimagine the banking journey—and perfect the experience
Banks must optimize every customer touchpoint, whatever their requirement, moving from transactional to transformational and ensuring exceptional experiences. This means empowering their staff to unlock new revenue opportunities and improve customer support, with AI-driven end-to-end visibility across the omni-channel experience.
Unified observability allows organizations to transform disparate data into intelligent user insights, making these the driving force behind increased revenue streams. Many of our clients focus heavily on digital experience improvement, utilizing unified observability to identify potential upgrades to networks and devices, compare employee experiences and productivity levels, and track how satisfied each business unit is before, during, and after implementing changes, such as new software versions.
Reimagine security and sustainability—to adapt to the future
Increasing dependence on the cloud, SaaS, and shadow IT, along with the permanent shift to hybrid work, is evolving the regulatory landscape and expanding the range of security and compliance threats within the banking industry. Meanwhile, banks must meet stringent regulations to operate legally, maintain financial stability, manage risks effectively, protect their reputation, and build trust among customers and stakeholders.
We use our unified observability technology to help businesses build brand strength, underpinned by monitoring performance. They can ensure compliance and identify and address vulnerabilities simply and innovatively, by modernizing existing core banking applications with artificial intelligence and automation, transforming branch networks, adding governance and control tools, and basing decisions on essential data. Our solutions can audit app usage and even capture and store every packet and flow, aiding in threat-hunting investigations and analysis into suspicious network behavior.
As well as being security-conscious, today’s banks are increasingly focused on sustainability to stay relevant in a world where consumer loyalty is fleeting and making a difference to the planet means more than making a profit.
Unified observability can support sustainability strategies and guide banks on their path to net zero in many ways. One way it helps is by identifying devices and infrastructure with high energy consumption, alerting staff to the resource they’re using and reminding them to power down while their devices are idle. It can even remotely turn off energy-draining hardware, like laptops, when not in action.
Experience the future
By fusing data, insights, and actions, Riverbed helps banks enable faster, more effective decision-making and continuously improve the omni-channel experience for employees and customers. Get in touch today to learn more about how our unified observability solutions can empower you to unlock the future of banking, where experience is everything.