How Automation, AI and Agile are Enabling Smart Next-Generation Banking

Dr. Ashok Karania — January 2, 2020

There are few industries where technology is driving change as fundamentally and as fast as in the banking sector. In the UK, mobile banking has already eclipsed visits to high street retail branches, while 61 percent of people in the US would switch banks due to a poor mobile banking experience. Adding to the pace of change is regulation such as open banking in the UK and Europe, together with higher expectations to do with customer experience. Gen Z, and to a certain extent millennials, expect superior QoE while wanting complete control, ownership and visibility of all their personal data.

Enabling next-generation banking services is foundational to surviving and thriving in this sector. In an industry where digital native fintechs compete directly and often extremely effectively with traditional incumbents, concepts and techniques considered bleeding edge just a couple of years ago are now standardized solutions. Blockchain and AI are both very good examples.

Digitizing banking has already transformed the lives of the underbanked and unbanked in the world and yet it is only the tip of the iceberg of what is possible as banking regulations and consumer preferences shift to enable customer-centric, digital, borderless experiences.

Does your operating model support your digital strategy?

To put it another way, the ability to get new digital services to market more quickly while assuring optimal performance, functionality and quality is becoming a fundamental requirement for almost any company in the banking sector. The methodology underpinning digital transformation is DevOps, which relies heavily on optimizing and then automating the many thousands of tests in a company’s digital lifecycle.

Infostretch helped on of the world’s largest banks to move to a DevOps model in order to be able to get new digital offerings to market faster. It involved the automation of 100+ apps across five lines of business within a coded pipeline, resulting in the time taken for app onboarding to be cut from five days to 30 minutes as well as a 30% efficiency gain in testing efforts. Learn more about Infostretch’s approach to DevOps and Agile practices here.

How can you accelerate the path to digital banking?

Continuous Delivery is the foundation of business agility in the digital age and is a prerequisite for any financial company wishing to compete against digitally native neobanks and fintechs. Take our example from earlier of one of the world’s largest banks. Through its engagement with Infostretch, it was able to retire its legacy tools and move to a continuous delivery framework that accelerated time to market, increased the quality of its digital solutions while creating significant cost and time efficiencies across the entire development lifecycle. Or, consider a leading national bank we worked with where continuous delivery enabled it to enhance its entire value stream, from opportunity identification to product release.

For companies whose growth has started to accelerate, their digital infrastructure must be able to scale. This is exactly how we helped GlobeOne to build out its development infrastructure to support rapid growth.

Are you enhancing the lives of your customers?

If a bank’s customers are 38 or younger, the chances are they have significantly different expectations of what technology should be able to do for them than previous generations. Becoming more customer centric should be the backbone of any digital transformation initiative. There are tools that can help too. APIs are starting to be used extensively through a combination of regulations like Payment Services Directive (PSD2) and pressure to deliver more personalized financial products.

Similarly, smart analytics can shine a light on to customers’ needs. Infostretch worked with a London-based payment services company to assist its retail customers in better understanding their sales cycles and to minimize how much they spend to acquire a new customer. We incorporated next-generation technologies such as ML, AI and omni-channel data analytics to turn disparate data into actionable insights.

Can you do all this, and more, with…less?

There is little doubt that the need to cut costs continues to be a big driver for technology adoption. The good news is that 39 percent of banking executives say that technology has had the most impact in reducing their costs (Business Insider). Modernizing legacy systems to a continuous delivery pipeline, as one of the world’s largest banks did, delivers efficiency gains across the whole development and testing lifecycle. In that particular case, it also cut their OPEX by $ 5 million in 18 months.

Is your security keeping pace?

Blockchain and AI-powered security solutions will have an increasing role to play in security and fraud detection and prevention. Where traditional banking infrastructure focused on securing points of access, the increasingly digitized ecosystem requires security considerations to be “baked in” from much earlier in the development lifecycle.

We recently worked with a leading national bank to analyze 150,000+ test results with the goal of optimizing the process and identifying real application defects. By implementing configurable AI algorithms to identify defect patterns and automatically categorize them into error types, the client was able to allow its regression engineers to focus on actual failures with potentially critical consequences. It was easy and quick to spot the real errors.

Business & Finance Articles on Business 2 Community

(55)