Key Remote Sites Banks Must Monitor During Holiday Season - Vinay Sharma, Regional Director, India and SAARC, NETSCOUT

In the banking industry, trust is the cornerstone of a company's reputation and customer loyalty. Network and application performance issues can erode this trust, prompting loyal customers to seek more reliable institutions to safeguard their finances.

During the holiday and festive seasons, consumer spending in India sees a significant surge, particularly in unique gifts and travel. This spike in expenditure highlights the growing demand for reliable banking services, including credit and debit card authorizations, deposits, and withdrawals. Today’s customers expect seamless, secure, and uninterrupted access to online transactions across mobile apps, web platforms, and voice-based services.

For retail banks, ensuring compliance, robust security, and service level assurance across financial delivery platforms is more critical than ever. Customers must trust their banks to safeguard their accounts and execute transactions flawlessly. In a competitive banking landscape where reputation directly influences customer loyalty, consistent network and application performance is vital to success.

Digital transformation and mobile banking have reshaped the financial services industry, placing a premium on delivering exceptional digital experiences to sustain customer satisfaction and loyalty. Customer service remains a cornerstone, ensuring prompt resolution of issues and seamless assistance when needed.

Given the complexity of banking infrastructures, IT teams require comprehensive end-to-end visibility across data centers, cloud environments, and distributed remote locations. This holistic observability is essential for maintaining the convenience and accessibility that customers expect from modern banks.

Key Remote Locations That Gain from Enhanced Observability

To troubleshoot effectively and minimize disruptions to customers and employees, leading banks rely on end-to-end visibility across these remote locations,

1.    Contact centers: To ensure high-quality digital experiences for customers, banks require real-time monitoring of voice and video technologies. Issues like lagging connections, dropped calls, or muffled audio during time-sensitive interactions with contact center agents can lead to frustration and loss of business.  Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) offers critical insights into network performance, identifying issues affecting voice and video services, such as error data, Quality-of-Service (QoS) class assignments, and metrics like the Mean Opinion Score (MOS). Additionally, synthetic testing enables IT teams to evaluate service quality before customers connect with agents, ensuring smooth interactions and high satisfaction levels, regardless of the agent's location.

2.    ATMs: During the busy holiday season with customers traveling more, they rely on seamless access to their accounts through ATMs, whether from their cars or bank vestibules. Remote observability at ATM sites ensures availability for quick withdrawals, deposits, and transfers, delivering the convenience customers expect.

Smooth and efficient user experiences help avoid long queues and frustrated shoppers, maintaining customer satisfaction. Conversely, disruptions requiring resets, reboots, or repairs inconvenience users and reduce IT staff productivity, especially when on-site support is needed.

3.  Bank branches: All major banks operate branches nationwide, providing a diverse range of services to meet customer needs. From opening and managing accounts to cash transactions, financial advice, or notary services, branch banking offers the personal, face-to-face interaction many customers prefer for handling their finances.

These physical locations rely on technologies such as video streaming for security and robust Wi-Fi to support services like mobile app downloads. Remote observability equips IT teams with real-time insights into network and application performance at branch locations, even when they are not physically present, ensuring seamless operations. Packet-level visibility plays an important role in maintaining employee productivity and delivering a satisfying customer experience.

4.  Third-party vendors: Banks depend on third-party vendors to drive technological advancements and enhance customer experiences. However, these partnerships also introduce various risks. Whether vendors provide technology and services like credit card processing, overdraft protection, mortgage lending, or brokerage support, maintaining observability of their technology's performance is essential.

This visibility enables IT teams to determine the accountability of network and application performance issues, eliminating finger-pointing and blame-shifting. Banks can ensure reliable service delivery and strengthen customer trust by streamlining troubleshooting and reducing mean time to repair (MTTR).

How banks can increase remote-site observability

Digital transformation, cloud migration, SaaS and UCaaS adoption, and the rise of the hybrid workforce have added significant complexity to the connected world. These developments have also introduced visibility gaps that impede efficient problem resolution. In this landscape, "Smart Visibility" is critical for pinpointing end-user experience issues across the entire transaction path—remote clients, networks, clouds, and data center service edges.

In banks, by leveraging scalable Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) to continuously monitor network and application performance at remote sites, IT teams can significantly reduce MTTR for performance issues—or proactively prevent them from affecting customers and employees. Early-warning systems, packet-level insights, and proactive synthetic testing enable IT teams to track performance and user experience in real-time, mitigating the risk of disruptions and ensuring business resilience.

During the holiday season, leading banks can gain a competitive edge by evaluating their current infrastructure and conducting capacity planning to accommodate increased traffic while safeguarding critical services. Without comprehensive observability across all operational edges—spanning data centers, the cloud, and remote sites—banks face heightened IT support costs due to the need for on-site troubleshooting. Moreover, performance issues left unchecked can escalate into outages, leading to customer dissatisfaction, attrition, and long-term reputational damage.  This is where solutions that improve remote-site visibility and drastically cut down troubleshooting time for banks prove invaluable.