Why IT automation must be at the heart of every bank’s digital transformation – New Statesman

Bank of Americas onlinebanking platform suffered an outage lasting several hoursatthe beginning of October, locking customers out of their accounts and triggering 12,000 complaints. Its the kind of incident banking and payments companies live in fear of, impacting a vital service for customers and risking huge reputational damage.

Outages can befall any business in any sector, but in banking and payments these can produce calamitous fallout. As digital banking swallows traditional banking, the stakes get ever higher.

For more information about Hexawares Tensai suite for banks and financial services organisations, download the whitepaper.

The banking sector has become more precarious, with80 percent of financial institutionsbelieving business to be at riskof losing outto innovative newcomers. Among younger customers,who are more likely to use digital services,one in threewould be willing to swap banks in the next 90 days,and a similar proportion say they will not need a bank at all in the coming years.Banking CEOs aremore concernedabout the pace of technological change than other sectors. To keep abreast of technological change and remain competitive, its vital that banking firms adopt an IT-first strategy.

Investing in automation is one of the mostadvisable/essential/resourcefulactions banking and payments firms can take to future-proof their organisations. Automation can helpprevent outages,identify the reasons for outagesfasterand get an application back online as quickly as possible. Technologies like HexawaresTensaiTMforAI Ops digest data from multiple sources and automate routine tasks like monitoring, managing and testing across anorganisationshardware, networks, datacentresand software.TensaiTMfor AI Opsuses pre-emptive pattern recognition to flag anomalies and analyse events in order to rapidly remedy disruptions.

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We deploy what we like to call a neighbourhood behaviour watchusing time series-based algorithmsto find answers for questions like, were any other systems or network devices impacted around the same time orwere there other applications that could potentially be affected?, says Hexawaresexecutivevicepresident andpracticehead (Digital IT Ops), Hemant Vijh. This helps us in incident isolation and tells us how severe the issue is.

For more information about Hexawares Tensai suite for banks and financial services organisations, download the whitepaper.

TensaiTMfor AI Ops uses self-healing bots to automate the solution for up to 40 per cent of incidents. The way we look at it, the best incident is the incident that never happened, saysVijh,adding thatas soon as the system detects an anomaly that needs action, the automation engine kicks in toanalyseand resolve it before human intervention.It can estimate the revenue impact of an incident too, translating technical data into actionable business insights.

Leading companies are,more deeply,integrating AIin customer-focused applications, back-office applications and risk management, according to PwC research. Automation of core technological components creates a foundation upon which more sophisticated operations can be layered, like onboarding new clients, credit scoring and electronic know-your-customer. Hexawares TensaiTMrange ofproducts delivered automation-enabled savings for a Swiss bank,achievingamore than 400 per centreturn on investment(ROI). Banks that wish to remain competitive require a future-forward stack that marries core systems and automated analytics in an integrated architecture.

One of the greatest challenges for automation in banking and financial institutions are siloed, complex and expensive-to-maintain legacy IT systems. Technologies likeTensaiTMfor AI Opscan unify disparate data sets and create synergy between different systems pushing down transaction costs and exploiting new customer data sets. ItplacesIT leaders in the control room, with a dashboard view of all of the interacting systems and workflows, marrying the technical and business sides of the operation.

While different businesses have specific requirements in terms of workflows,Vijhsaysif you have to commission or decommission a particular server/environment, or any other similar workflow, there are multiple components that need to be stitched through.He continues:We have automated the whole chain there. For one of our customers, there was a ten-member team that was just doing this work, but now our bots are actively doing that jobmuch faster andwithout any manual effort.

Fewer than 20per centof automation deployments reach the scale they want because enterprises are unable to identify use cases. Hexaware helpsorganisationsapply a systematic approach to discover use cases where automation will add the maximum value, letting themrealisescalability upfront. Automated self-monitoring and preventive maintenance diminish the risk of disruption to vital operations and ensure applications run as smoothly as possible.

For more information about Hexawares Tensai suite for banks and financial services organisations, download the whitepaper.

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Why IT automation must be at the heart of every bank's digital transformation - New Statesman