Agility key to winning financial services
Southeast Asian banks are using microservices and the cloud in response to consumer trends, writes Damien Wong
In this digital age, personal banking has been redefined and the playing field has expanded. Traditional banking services such as payments, money transfers, remittances and even personal loans are now available through mobile banking services, peer-to-peer (P2P) applications, QR codes and other financial technology innovations.
In Southeast Asia, banks are responding to the trend by introducing mobile banking applications that can offer alwayson, real-time services. Most banks now enable customers to access their accounts and conduct simple banking transactions anytime, anywhere through mobile apps. Some of these apps include authentication features and enable users to customise their accounts.
As consumer lifestyles and habits evolve, the financial services industry needs to continually transform itself through innovative products, services and processes. To deliver better customer experiences, financial institutions can turn to technology to help them become more agile and, in turn, respond more quickly to customer needs and deploy new applications.
How to achieve agility: To achieve agility, financial institutions can look to DevOps, microservices and the cloud — all of which have roots in open-source programming — to enable themselves to respond more quickly to business requirements in a highly regulated industry.
Build fast, iterate rapidly: Mobile app development often necessitates faster development and deployment cycles as apps are often continuously created, updated and retired. This can require as much agility and flexibility as possible — from front-end app development to backend integration, testing and deployment.
This “build fast, iterate rapidly” model can be supported by microservices architecture and DevOps, essentially a set of practices that automates the processes between software development and IT teams.
Microservices architecture is a flexible way of building enterprise applications, where complex apps are structured as a collection of modular, independent services.
While microservices communicate using a representational state transfer (RESTful) application program interface (APIs) and lightweight messaging, they also help modernise legacy enterprise systems. With a microservices-based architecture, application development can become more agile, helping meet the requirements of a fastpaced digital business.
A DevOps culture can evolve as developers and operations teams collaborate, bringing infrastructure and deployment awareness into the early stages of creation. Development teams collaborate to build services to serve specific business requirements.
At the same time, the operations teams handle security, compliance, app deployment and infrastructure management. DevOps can help IT teams coordinate mobile app creation and the back-end integration that supports them.
Automation: Technology fuels innovation, and automation can be the highoctane fuel that financial institutions need to reduce costs and risks. Automation is about much more than configuration management and siloed teams writing scripts. It can also benefit the entire end-to-end IT process.
Effective application management often requires a tool that can provision resources, make configuration changes and run commands across a variety of environments designed to help everything and everybody work together faster.
Grab is a successful example of how automation can help transform business. Because of the need to deploy application features to production hundreds of times each week, the ride-hailing platform needed to gain greater infrastructure scalability and stability, as well as simplify management for its growing engineering team.
Through automation, Grab has managed to increase its aggregate app uptime to 99.99%, as well as reduce development and deployment time. As a result, its users can access the app when needed, and its IT teams can offer more stable systems capable of scaling to match feature expansion and user base growth.
Collaboration: The financial services industry is starting to embrace open innovation. Regulators in the region now encourage the industry to adopt APIs as a foundation for innovation. Heeding this call, some regional banks are opening access to data through APIs to enable partners to integrate with their products and services to enable new applications aimed at improving customer experiences. These collaborations can enable organisations to leverage each other’s strengths and help accelerate the speed of innovation to benefit consumers.
In his keynote address at the 2017 Red Hat Summit, Red Hat chief executive Jim Whitehurst observed that in a world driven by fast innovation, planning is dead. The traditional model of “plan, prescribe and execute” may no longer be relevant, because the human ability to predict the future may be less reliable as the world becomes faster, more ambiguous and more complex.
What is important is you sharpen your organisation’s proverbial weapons, build a well-orchestrated army and collaborate with a strong network of allies. Organisations that do this well may be the ones that emerge as winners on a financial battlefield.
This ‘build fast, iterate rapidly’ model can be supported by microservices architecture.