The banking sector was in a turnaround even before the downturn threw a shadow over the financial markets. Neobanks were altering the competitive landscape for regulated banks, and the pandemic pushed quick adoption by the “on-the-go” consumer who was expecting more from safe mobile banking applications. The core of banks’ IT departments, which were attempting to keep up with the rapidly changing banking industry, was being shaken by these trends.

To find out how they are prioritizing technology adoption, Forrester surveyed banking leaders (paywalls). The results were not that unexpected. Top on the list is 5G, microservices architecture, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. It was intended to achieve a delicate balance between encouraging experience and producing income while limiting costs by increasing the interest of IT professionals in these technologies.

One-third of the participants were already utilizing AI to mine data from financial systems for insights. More than 30% of respondents said that ML was improving the consumer experience. In fact, these technologies’ insights were continually enabling banks to provide consumers with more individualized services and make better business decisions.

The transformation of customer-facing applications, maintaining availability, and achieving a high degree of performance must be coordinated with the management of the infrastructure and network supporting applications using these technologies. The banking industry is changing as a result of the use of AI, ML, and predictive analytics to service performance management, change management, and fault management.

As the majority of businesses begin utilizing 5G for low-latency communications, it is anticipated that it will become a general-purpose technology for the financial services industry. Moreover, half of the poll participants said that customer service was a key application for the technology, despite the fact that 5G infrastructure is only now starting to develop. Even the most experienced network management teams will find it difficult to handle 5G speeds and their complexity.

Management applications must rely on automation and high-level service management to deliver high availability and long-term performance as banks serve clients and adhere to regulatory regulations.

Automation & Service

A change in the way delivery infrastructure is planned, put into practice, and most crucially operated is required to enable smart banking applications—applications that integrate machine and human intelligence. Without major adjustments to cross-system monitoring, root cause analysis, and incident response, pivoting smart banking applications would be difficult. The expectation of “real-time” takes on a whole new meaning when you’re servicing a customer on a mobile device who is rushing to pay bills, transfer money, or check your account balance.

Automated operation requires changes to AIOps. There is only so much that can be done manually. The complexities of today’s network and application stacks have increased, at times, error-prone and time-consuming manual processes. Human intelligence working alone has limits that can be improved in the following ways.

• Experienced labor shortage persists – supercharged organizations are combining human and machine intelligence to fill the gap.

• Customers give “stars” to applications that are hassle-free and prevent downtime in a five-star production.

• Quick Average Time To Repair (MTTR) prevents a negative review if availability is restored quickly and without reboots.

Wide-scope AIOps provide the ability to simplify complexity. Organizations that have surpassed AIOps often report these five capabilities you’ll need to build a future operations center.

1. Defect and performance management in one solution.

2. Noise reduction from out-of-box algorithms, such as the default correlation algorithm.

3. Reliable automation incorporating digital fingerprinting and relevance scoring.

4. Custom Dashboard.

5. Ability to add new data sets in less than an hour.

Why these five? Implementing AIOps with the right features provides immediate and lasting benefits.

• A fast start and a foundation for continued success.

• Improved efficiency for all users of the AIOps platform.

• Increased trust in automation that can fail when users don’t trust it and its suggested responses to defects.

• Quick response to service interruptions.

When customers’ expectations are exceeded, they give five-star ratings. A new approach for controlling system and network performance and availability is needed for smart banking applications. When clients rate their banking experience, they are rating their provider’s capacity to understand their needs and consistently deliver on those needs. Modern businesses prioritize cutting-edge technologies like AI, ML, 5G, and NLP while using the comprehensive AIOps platform for service management to ensure five-star evaluations.