Times are rapidly changing. Customers are buying homeowner’s insurance faster than it takes them to order a pizza and processing payments in new and inventive ways. They’re putting their trust into innovative apps more every day to improve their financial lives.
Banking and financial services firms that can’t keep up with evolving customer expectations face serious revenue losses and dimming prospects to the future prosperity of their institutions. In order to meet (and exceed) these expectations, organizations must accelerate innovation and app modernization.
A full 70% of financial services organizations are at advanced levels of digital transformation—the highest rate of any industry.1
Customer service functions are taking priority for modernization efforts at 49%. This tells us that banks and financial institutions are facing an uphill battle against changing customer experience expectations which can result in negative impacts to the bottom-line, especially with accelerated, widespread fintech pulling customers away and the impacts of COVID-19.
Plus, complex network architectures and app dev processes results in security vulnerabilities and inefficiencies that significantly increase operational costs, making it difficult to compete with tech companies.
Top 3 FinTech Trends Disrupting Financial Services in 2021
Smart, seamless and low-cost offerings from fintechs are attracting customers
To that end, 49% of banking and investment CIOs, and 44% of insurance CIOs plan to increase their investments in automation this year.2
Top 5 Digital Transformation Challenges with Fintechs in Mind
Gain insights and guidance on key areas in the battle against fintechs
As institutions expand app services and infrastructure to meet increasing customer needs, pursuing DevOps reduces the number of development tools and technologies, which reduces operational complexity in software development. But the speed associated with modern DevOps can become the enemy of security.
How can you support rapid transformation at scale through accessible and secure applications, while optimizing your digital operations?
Fundamentals Matter in the Era of DevOps
Building security into new systems and applications is crucial.
Rapid App Innovation Challenges Are Holding Financial Institutions Back
The list of new features your customers expect seemingly grows longer every few months. And if you can't provide it, they’ll get it elsewhere.
Sure, you can invest in fintech firms or collaborate with them through open banking to quickly meet customer expectations, but often you need to develop modern connectivity for third-party services and develop applications in house to gain complete control of the technology so you can scale within your legacy systems.
Unfortunately, you're often saddled with solutions that are unable to handle complexity or change and don’t have the measure of automation needed to streamline configuration and shorten time to market.
Your current solutions may also lack robust security capabilities, like protecting your apps from attacks by building security directly into the CI/CD pipeline. Vulnerabilities associated with evolving app development and modernization processes can lead to successful attacks and abuses against banking and financial services organizations. They’re coming for your customer’s data. And even worse, their money.
O’Reilly Media Web Application Security eBook
Available compliments of F5, this O’Reilly Media eBook features practical security tips that can save your company millions from data breaches with advice that your dev and security teams can use right away.
The Security Paradox: Maximizing the Digital Experience for Real Customers
The paradox at the heart of modern risk management strategy is balancing security with usability. Your goal is to use security to protect your customers. But while strict security and fraud controls may stop some attackers, they can negatively impact the experience for all customers.
Developing every innovation on the list above is moot if customers are abandoning digital engagements due to security friction. But the loss of individual revenue generating opportunities is only half the story. Thinking about the bigger picture, organizations need to focus on initiatives that directly improve how their brand is perceived among competitors. Top line revenue growth, improved customer satisfaction, and higher customer acquisition and retention are all key factors to consider.
Lack of Modern Infrastructure Is Hindering Effective Digital Transformation
Legacy architectures and processes often lead to technical debt, messy proprietary integrations, lack of visibility, and tech sprawl which all negatively impact banking and financial services institutions bottom lines.
of BFSI tech leaders will be investing to improve IT systems to better support new digital technologies.
Balancing Fraud Prevention with the Customer Experience
Achieving higher loyalty and revenue with lower fraud.
New research from IBM's Market Development and Insights team on microservices revealed that 51% of IT executives surveyed lament the "lack of modern infrastructure needed to effectively run microservices."3 This could explain why 57% of banking and financial services tech leaders who identified as "going through a digital transformation" to Forrester will be investing to improve IT systems to better support new digital technologies.4
Additionally, the challenges associated with designing your own cloud‑native services and infrastructure or applying modern industry practices for observability, monitoring, and security in production can frustrate even the most seasoned IT professionals.
Cloud Native DevOps with Kubernetes
Learn how to better build, deploy, and scale modern applications in the cloud.
Banking and Financial Services Digital Transformation With Production Grade Kubernetes Deployment
F5 and NGINX bring security into agile development technology while Red Hat OpenShift provides the modern dev architecture needed to achieve the agility required by banking and financial services companies.
Digital transformation is the key to maintaining exceptional customer experiences for financial services institutions. That’s why 10 of the top 10 global insurance companies and 15 of the top 15 U.S. commercial banks have F5 solutions deployed.
You need the right solutions in place that accelerate innovation and app modernization by enabling automation and self-service for app and API delivery across hybrid, multi-cloud, and container-based environments. F5 and NGINX not only provide this, but unlike other solutions, they don’t lock you into a specific environment and there’s no trade-off between performance and security.
Increase Development Velocity with F5
F5 is uniquely situated to increase development velocity by minimizing security related issues, outages, and breaches in production. How? By accelerating shift-left strategies and integrating web application firewall (WAF) services into your CI/CD pipelines.
What makes F5 solutions unique?
Built on F5's proven expertise, NGINX App Protect protects multi-cloud and container workloads with high accuracy and app- or API-specific protection services. Graduate beyond native cloud’s basic features and limited functionality without having to modify your applications.
Proven Digital Optimization Designed to Minimize Complexity
Fast track your digital transformation journey with adaptive app solutions that minimize developer downtime and reduce overhead through automation and flexible managed services.
With F5 and NGINX supporting your API strategy, you can define, secure, and deploy cloud native API services anywhere your application services run. Our innovative architecture enables high performance and scalable API solutions while providing enterprise grade security and DoS protections that ensure only your customers have safe and secure access to your critical services. Integrate NGINX API management features with other NGINX and F5 solutions to build out and complete an entire application infrastructure platform.
But don't take our word on it, NGINX's API Gateway is the preferred infrastructure component that processes API traffic for our competitors' solutions including Apigee, Kong, and RedHat.5
Nearly everyone with a mature digital transformation program is leveraging multi-cloud solutions for customer redundancy or taking advantage of unique platform features. Instead of building out multiple native cloud app architectures and point solutions that only solve one need, deploy only the unique functionality you need and rely on F5 to centralize and manage your traffic, security, and application services anywhere.
F5 goes beyond point solutions and solves customer needs from edge to containerized application servers and service mesh.
Capital One cuts costs and consolidates infrastructure with F5
Capital One had an internal infrastructure that was complex to manage and expensive to run. They turned to F5 and NGINX for a solution and found that a single group of NGINX servers could handle all of their API traffic routing needs and do so without introducing latency into the equation.
Learn more about how Capital One streamlined their complexity and reduced costs.
Shawbrook Bank accelerates and scales digital transformation
“The decision to work with F5 was clear cut. They were the only solution provider with extensive application expertise, as well as the full range of security and cloud solutions that we needed to move the needle for our digital transformation and customer service requirements.”
– Alan Harper, Head of Infrastructure, Shawbrook Bank
Learn more about how F5 supported Shawbrook Bank
Want to see how it works?
Protect your Microservices Applications from North/South and East/West exploits using F5 and Ansible
[1] State of Application Strategy Report: Financial Services Edition 2021, F5
[2] How Intelligent Automation is Helping to Create the Next Generation of Financial Services, techUK
[3] Microservices in the enterprise, 2021: Real benefits, worth the challenges, IBM
[4] Business Technographics® Priorities And Journey Survey, 2020, Forrester
[5] NGINX Controller API Management Module vs. Kong: Performance Comparison, NGINX
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