CIO OPINION
Retail banks are looking at two ways to alleviate these pain points and to meet customers ’ rising expectations of digital banking services .
The final pain point is slow time to market . Many banks still operate in siloed divisional structures , but would benefit from having access to shared or common services that can act as ‘ building blocks ’ when assembling new apps or services . This kind of structure would prevent each team building the same foundational elements separately .
Two paths forward
The second pain point is getting reliability while scaling . Scaling up a system with bigger hardware or scaling out a system with more hardware may not necessarily make that system more reliable . There are other ways to approach scaling and reliability challenges that do not involve costly , risky or inefficient changes to the backend .
The third common pain point is increasing costs . As customers move online , banks are getting more traffic . Processing that traffic may be expensive , particularly for repetitive requests hitting an expensive backend infrastructure like a mainframe environment .
The next pain point is real-time enablement . This doesn ’ t necessarily mean instantaneous processing of customer requests ; rather , banks are looking at it more as a way to understand what customers want and to give them the right offer or assistance at the right time . For example , if a customer tries to withdraw money from an account with insufficient funds , they may be amenable to an offer of a short-term loan . If the bank has access to the right information and context , they can more effectively respond to customers ’ needs .
Retail banks are looking at two ways to alleviate these pain points and to meet customers ’ rising expectations of digital banking services .
The first way they can do this is by introducing a digital integration hub – an ultrafast data layer that sits between banking applications and the bank ’ s backend . Oftentimes , this layer uses in-memory computing , meaning it can process tasks and requests much faster than a system that draws data on and off hard disks .
Banking applications and services ‘ talk ’ directly to the data layer , making them more responsive and reliable . If any part of the backend that sits behind the hub goes down , customer-facing services remain online and functional . Changes made by a customer are also reflected in the backend systems , allowing those systems to remain the master data source of truth .
To enable real-time services , such as personalized offers and next-best conversations , banks are adding stream processing capabilities , which track how a customer is interacting with a service and can be used to guess what they might really want – now or next time they come in contact with the bank . p
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