Reducing Network Downtime in the Financial Services Sector is a Top Priority - Sanjay Radia, Chief Solutions Architect, NETSCOUT

Banks around the world have customers entrusting them with their money, finances and related sensitive personal data.  Time is money for these banks as customers demand seamless, round-the-clock, quick, and secure service.  Failure to do so leads to customer churn and reputational damage, hampering the bank’s profitability and perceived reliability and trustworthiness.  According to a report released last year, 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.

Unplanned Downtime:  A Costly Mistake that Force Multiplies Problems

Some of the key challenges stemming from performance outages faced by banks and their customers include:

•        Inability to withdraw required funds, a critical essential function of the ATM, leaves customers frustrated.
•        Inaccessibility of bank accounts and relevant information from online websites and mobile apps, preventing bill payment and fund transfers on time, resulting in late fees.
•        Delays in automatic payment processing which disrupts transactions between customers and third-party providers.
•        Deposit delays that lead to delays in the issuance of funds, especially on payday, when payroll files are not correctly transferred.
•        Problems with two-factor or multifactor authentication, such as breaches or delayed delivery of push notifications or unique one-time passcodes to the users’ mobile devices, can prevent customers from accessing their banking applications.

To no one’s surprise, news about these types of outages spreads through social media platforms, damaging the reputation and credibility of the financial institution.  Moreover, in a highly regulated industry like banking and finance, organizations may face serious punitive regulatory fines and restrictions when things fail and increase the risk painful legal consequences.

Downtime, poor performance and lack of availability and access to services can even wreck the most loyal of customer relationships.  Fastest way to lose customers is to negatively affect their ability to access their money.  Systems shutdowns, crisis IT management, increased labor cost, customer churn are all attention grabbing reasons for financial organizations to reassess and further improve their protection recovery strategy or critical services.

Maintaining Reliable Performance:  Seamless Operations and Maximum Uptime

By embracing digital transformation, the financial sector leveraged emerging technologies to enhance efficiency and improve effectiveness.  However, this also introduced a massive amount of greater complexity.  This new set of tools and technologies requires ongoing preventive maintenance and regular upgrades to sustain peak performance.  Only by conducting routine checks and timely updates can financial institutions minimize the risk of unexpected downtime and safeguard themselves from potential fiscal and reputational losses.

To prevent downtime and the resulting performance disruptions, financial institutions require holistic visibility across the service delivery ecosystem to support new access dynamics for all users and into threats targeting their networks.   Enterprise-wide visibility should be an integral part of a broad-based performance and availability strategy that encompasses not only the headquarters, remote offices, and private data centers, but also contact centers, public cloud, and SaaS environments.  IT teams need end-to-end visibility throughout their entire enterprise network - from SD-WAN and remote offices to hybrid/multi-cloud environments to co-los and data centers.

Furthermore, early warning capabilities, along with robust alerting and reporting with the right tools, enable IT professionals to swiftly address service disruptions and reduce mean time to repair (MTTR).  These tools help pinpoint the root causes of slowdowns and minimize delays caused by ticket reassignment.  Visibility tools can also support post-incident analysis, allowing organizations to create a detailed knowledge base from past issues, strengthening their ability to resolve future challenges quickly and efficiently.