Research reveals financial institutions are struggling to keep up with demand for digital transformation
The findings of an independent global survey, commissioned by Dynatrace, of 130 development and DevOps leaders responsible for driving innovation in financial institutions has revealed financial services organisations are struggling to keep up with demand for digital transformation. As consumers continue to shift from traditional face-to-face to online banking and insurance experiences, the pressure is rising for DevOps and SRE teams. They are expected to continuously deliver new high-quality digital capabilities to their customers, partners, and employees. However, the research shows that despite efforts to accelerate innovation, barriers remain. Siloed team culture, manual approaches, and increasingly complex tooling in financial IT departments are slowing innovation and making teams more reactive than proactive. This impedes their ability to drive value for the business and its customers.
Key findings of the research reveal:
- Rising demand for financial services innovation. On average, financial institutions expect to increase the frequency of their software releases by 61% in the next two years. Over half (56%) expect their average deployment frequency to be between once a week and once a month.
- The need for speed puts customer experience at risk. Nearly a fifth of respondents (18%) admit they’re often under so much pressure to meet the demand for faster innovation that they must sacrifice code quality, putting customer experience (CX) at risk.
- Universal agreement that DevOps is critical. 100% of respondents in the financial sector say extending DevOps to more applications is key for digital transformation and optimising CX.
- Manual processes hinder banking and insurance innovation. In financial institutions, over a quarter (29%) of DevOps teams’ time is spent on manual tasks, which reduces the time they have available to create new digital experiences.
“We’re in an age of the 24/7 economy, where customers rely heavily on online banking and insurance services and have a low tolerance for poor digital experiences,” said Greg Adams, Regional Vice President, UK & Ireland at Dynatrace. “When many bank branches closed during lockdowns, and face-to-face interactions with insurance brokers were restricted, customers were forced to use digital channels, which raised their expectations for what online and mobile experiences can deliver. Now, they expect constantly reliable and high-quality online services, which puts financial institutions under huge pressure to accelerate innovation. After all, if they can’t deliver the financial services journey their customers are looking for, there’s no shortage of rivals who will be only too happy to take their custom.”
Additional findings include:
- Automation and observability are essential. Financial institutions are investing in eliminating manual incident response (66%), the automation of manual tasks (65%), and end-to-end observability (49%) to boost developer productivity.
- Extending AIOps across the innovation cycle is key. 78% of financial institutions say extending AIOps beyond traditional use cases will play a critical role in their future success.
- A unified platform is at the heart of banking innovation. 78% of respondents say end-to-end observability will be essential to DevOps in the future, and 72% say a unified platform will be critical to scaling DevOps beyond a single lighthouse project.
“The financial services market is more competitive than ever, with agile fintech players now adding even more fuel to the fire of innovation,” continued Adams. “Organisations are realising that scaling DevOps is key to out-performing competitors, yet time-consuming manual processes, siloed cultures, and an explosion of alerts from monitoring tools continue to hold them back. To overcome these barriers, financial services firms need an intelligent approach, combining end-to-end observability, precise insights, and continuous automation. This will enable their teams to deliver high-quality software faster and create innovative and reliable financial services experiences.”
The research is based on a global survey of 130 senior-level development and DevOps leaders in financial institutions with more than 1,000 employees, conducted by Coleman Parkes and commissioned by Dynatrace.
