WHY FINANCIAL SERVICES NEED TO ADOPT LEAN AND AGILE PRINCIPLES

By Philip Farah, AVP Head Digital Transformation Services, Global Accounts at World Wide Technology (WWT)

 

The financial services industry is going through major changes as it prepares itself for a digital future.

With the pandemic in play, social distancing rules drove digital uptake amongst consumers as most highstreets banks were closed, forcing many people to manage their finances remotely. As society has adjusted to this change, and ‘banking through a screen’ has become the new normal, financial services institutions are feeling the pressure to integrate new technologies that will meet the demands and expectations of digitally savvy customers.

Prior to the pandemic, it took IT teams in financial services up to 18 months to release a new product. However, with increasing customer demands for digital services combined with the backdrop of the pandemic, this is not fast enough. Speeding up this process is a key challenge for the financial services industry – and one that needs more attention.

This is where adopting lean and agile processes as well as DevOps processes that bridge the gap between Application Development and Infrastructure Operations, which are used by some of the most advanced technology companies in the world, can help.

 

Following the trend

Service offering is a key competitive differentiator in the financial services sector. The rise of new fintech players, who already use agile principles, has forced traditional financial institutions to emulate the way they work.

Fintechs have demonstrated that Agile and DevOps can speed up the rate of innovation and reduce time to market. This has been observed by the wider financial services industry. The onus is now on the incumbents to integrate agile (and DevOps) practices to match this pace.

Companies understand they need to adopt lean and agile principles – as it will help speed up the process of replacing legacy technologies with modern digital innovations or bolting on new digital front ends on top of existing systems (through the use of APIs and Mircoservices). But the question is, from a practical perspective, how do large financial institutions implement lean and agile principles that will give them the ability to evolve and compete? One answer is the cloud.

 

Cloud as an enabler

Cloud service providers offer products that deliver a seamless extension of the enterprise private cloud into the public hosting sphere. This includes tools to manage an agile development process, such as Kanban. More importantly, it leverages seamless links between app development and infrastructure operations (e.g., automated infrastructure provisioning).

This means developers can set up infrastructure on demand to accelerate development and deployment of new applications to support business opportunities. Moreover, this integration allows financial institutions to deploy at scale especially in situations where spikes in demand are frequent.

However, migrating to the cloud has challenges. A move to cloud-based collaboration requires cultural change. And innovations such as automation open up operational and security risks. Therefore, it is easier to get developers rallied behind DevOps than teams running security or operations.

This is why a successful and broad adoption of Agile and DevOps at the enterprise level is conditional on operations, security and development teams working hand in hand with a joint strategy and prioritisation plan aimed at peeling the value/risk onion in layers.

Organisations are working tirelessly to solve these challenges. Businesses will require solid leadership, and a strategic plan in place to act on. It is those organisations that overcome these barriers that will succeed in a new cloud enabled future.

 

The lean and agile tech revolution

While the public cloud removes some of the constraints to the adoption of lean and agile principles, financial services Institutions have to pursue a hybrid approach the includes their on-prem infrastructure as well with the goal of creating seamless infrastructure provisioning and workload migration capabilities that cut across public and private infrastructure.

To do so, they need to invest in observability, AI, automation, and security through upping their skills /expertise in areas such as AIOps, DevOps, DevSecOps, GitOps, design thinking, and agile development.

Bottom line is that for Financial Services Institutions to be able to accelerate time-to-market, they need to adopt new capabilities and upskill their teams today, focus on quick wins (new Apps in the cloud as an example) while setting the foundations for a comprehensive enterprise-wide adoption of Agile and DevSecOps to expand the reach to legacy apps and private Infrastructure.

 

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