DevOps Essential for Digital Innovation in Banking & Financial Services

As every company becomes a software company, every financial organization now becomes a FinTech organization. But what does a successful implementation of technology for financial organizations mean? As a Financial Services company, one has complex and rigorous software development processes to meet intense regulatory requirements and is expected to release software faster than ever to meet customer expectations.

Also, the challenges faced by these organizations are immense like corporate governance and a myriad of regulatory and compliance requirements like SOX2, PCI-DSS, and many others, make it a key Finance industry challenge. Growth is also a challenge, and swift onboarding of new developers is essential. Admins need an easy way to assign permissions and access privileges. Expanding the number of users drives up network transactions, storage and performance need – so deployment flexibility and easy scalability are required. Financial services in India are often seen using decade-old legacy platforms, that sometimes lack security and compliance to meet regulatory guidelines. Introducing new technologies can also be a challenge for companies with established processes, policies, and governance.

To survive in the aggressively competitive financial ecosystem, which is being increasingly penetrated by innovation banks, FinTech organisations like PhonePe, and PayTM, and non-banks like Amazon, customer experience will become the differentiating factor. And with customers now demanding an omnichannel experience, digitalization has become inevitable. To sustain profitability in a rapidly changing environment characterized by evolving customer demands, agile competitors, and stringent regulations, banks need to develop products fast, launch them faster, release application updates frequently, and with security- to enable new functionality and benefits to their users and new business efficiencies.

Consumers these days switch banks because of the features provided on the app for mobile banking and the app that can serve faster are winning in the business. These providers known as elite performers release features 208 times faster than the rest. Some of our analyses show that elite performers have 7 times lower change failure rates, 2604 times faster to recover from an incident, and 106 times faster from committing to deploying. This makes the elite performers always ahead of the game, competition, and the low performers.

Another biggest need and worry for any financial institution is security. Early last year we realized the capabilities of meltdown and spectrum malware attacks that exploited coding errors and poor design. But Google security researchers say that the fundamental flaw in the nature of computing could make some threats impossible to defeat. Although it is impossible to prevent, and if you get hit by them, it's a race on who is faster, the attacker or you. There are different steps to go about it, identifying the security risk, fixing it, and deploying it to production, or updating your dependencies. An elite performer in this case can mitigate the risk faster and wins.

In India, it's an evolutionary pressure, to release faster, improve stability, and embrace cloud. While many banks in India still do not qualify to be elite performers, the pressure is building up. Most institutions are now looking at DevOps as the pressure releaser. Digital transformation in the financial services industry will help firms better orient themselves to support software innovation and faster, better quality releases to meet new customer demands and phase out slow legacy technology. A DevOps culture backed by a well-planned continuous testing strategy is a recipe for success for the financial services sector. DevOps brings security throughout the software development lifecycle, enabling the detection of vulnerabilities and/or license compliance issues early on, traceability from code to production, improving release stability, security, and quality. Hence choosing the right DevOps platform is a must. DevOps brings in a set of practices, tools, and culture (people) that enable organizations to release application updates faster, and with less risk. It helps organizations to switch from familiar, legacy tools; adopt activities aimed at infusing a culture of collaboration; learn new skills, and accept the role changes that DevOps will entail.

JFrog's DevOps platform allows software developers the ability to deliver software releases more quickly and efficiently – enabling the vision of Liquid Software, where application updates flow seamlessly from developers' fingertips to any device. JFrog's end-to-end DevOps platform provides flexibility and scalability demanded by today's modern software organizations to innovate and deliver ahead of the competition.

Digital transformation is a must to successfully compete with agile, digital-first players. With IT as a strategic driver of digitalization, revamping software development and delivery is vital. DevOps implementation eliminates the security problems before they become a major threat and scales the IT processes across the whole enterprise, thus allowing an end-to-end and vigorous pathway to production. A carefully thought-out DevOps strategy can help financial institutions quickly launch digital offerings and provide the much-needed push for digital transformation in India.

Author:

Kavita Viswanath, GM JFrog India