Not long ago, financial services (FinServ) institutions and financial technology (FinTech) companies were seen as natural adversaries with a familiar storyline: legacy industry giants under threat of disruption from nimble, digital-first newcomers. But the reality of the situation has proven more nuanced.

While deep resources and a broad market reach have offered powerful business advantages for FinServ organizations, FinTechs have had a better handle on the innovation needed to drive transformation, modernize systems, and enable a new generation of experiences and value for customers.

Now, FinServ and FinTech organizations are realizing they have something to gain from working together—and they’re starting to act accordingly.

Defining FinServ

FinServ institutions—banks, investment houses, lenders, finance companies, foreign exchange services, stock brokerages, credit unions, real estate brokers, and insurance companies—help businesses and consumers save, borrow, invest, move, and manage money and are the largest sector in the global economy in terms of earnings and equity market capitalization. Their services include everything from processing consumer credit card transactions to financing corporate acquisitions to helping individuals prepare tax returns and multinational corporations manage their financial risk.

Defining FinTech

Playing a complementary role to FinServ firms, FinTechs leverage new technologies like automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to improve and automate the delivery and use of financial services. By giving consumers and companies better ways to manage their financial operations—from personal bank accounts to split-second stock trades and algorithm-driven risk calculations—FinTechs help their customers earn more, save more, and make better decisions about their money.

Initially focused on the backend systems of established FinServs, FinTechs have increasingly moved into consumer-facing markets. Working across sectors that span education, retail banking, nonprofit, investment management, and cryptocurrency, FinTechs place a premium on rapid technological innovation, market agility, and consumer-centric experiences and branding.

Current trends and changing tides

Today, FinTechs and FinServs are actively seeking opportunities for cooperation, co-development, partnership, and sometimes, even acquisition. In a recent report on digital transformation in banking, Gartner^® discusses the challenges FinServ is facing from FinTechs, and offers recommendations for productive collaboration between the two.

For FinServs, these alliances can speed the time-to-market for innovations such as AI-driven insights, which can translate into new revenue opportunities and competitive differentiation. In a roundtable hosted by Gartner in November 2021, commercial banking and treasury leaders from major North American financial institutions agreed that “commercial banks lag retail and small business banking in the use of data to provide client value and must catch up.”

Cybercrime is also an issue that FinServ and FinTech collaboration can address. A subsequent Gartner blog post, “5 Commercial Banking Trends to Watch in 2022,” notes, “Banks are seeing cyber-fraud increase substantially and are doing more to monitor and preempt issues through data analysis. Some commercial banking leaders are considering productizing these data assets and skills as a value-add for clients.” FinTechs can help banks and credit card issuers use data insights to power automated fraud detection, flag suspicious attempted transactions, and notify customers before they are approved.

Separately, Deloitte notes that investment banks challenged by other trends such as evolving financial regulation and a rise in remote work and client sophistication will likely need to “retool certain business models and operational platforms” and “optimize the use of financial technology, data, and analytics to generate differentiated insight and added value.”

FinServ firms can get a crucial head start on these efforts—without investing in and developing those capabilities from the ground up—by collaborating with FinTech organizations. FinTechs can benefit as well, leveraging collaborative relationships to drive growth; scale and evolve their capabilities; and ultimately, build a more robust and sustainable business—whether freestanding or as an acquisition target.

Learn more about FinServ and FinTech in the Industry Topics section of BMC Blogs, and find out about BMC innovations for FinServ here.

When you’re in the hotly competitive and highly regulated finance industry, you can’t afford to take chances with the execution of your business services. Consider the end-of-day financial close process, for example. To ensure that your records are in order and that your systems will be ready for business the next morning, you’ve got to complete hundreds of intertwined workflows within a short window of time. Missing that deadline can impair service quality and put your firm at risk for significant fines.

New challenges will be posed by new industry regulation programs, such as the introduction of the FedNow^SM Service, a program under development by the U.S. Federal Reserve enabling financial institutions to provide real-time, instant payment services around the clock. While the service is certainly beneficial to businesses and consumers, the new workflows and processes associated with FedNow will only increase the volume and complexity of daily IT operations—and introduce new opportunities for things to go wrong.

In the age of big data, it’s also critical to ensure that business users can access the business insights they need to make optimal decisions. As agile FinTech startups bring a new generation of digital services to market, firms need to be sure that their technology operations won’t fall short of the demands of their strategy.

As microservices transform business workflows and interdependencies increase across business services, it becomes more and more critical for financial services firms to focus on operations management. When a job fails to execute correctly, it’s not enough to simply restart it and move on—you need to understand exactly what went wrong, and why, to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. To ensure resilient service delivery, IT operations teams need visibility into the various workloads running in the environment, and actionable insights to ensure that they will have the right resources at the right time to complete accurately, reliably, and on time.

Getting visibility into after-hours workloads

Most financial services organizations already rely on workload automation to ensure that real-time workflows and processes are meeting those benchmarks, and in a fully auditable manner. If something goes wrong—if the runtime of a job is unusually long or short, or it fails to run at the right frequency—the service owner can quickly identify the abnormality and take action to ensure that the job is completed before service delivery is affected. However, there’s more to availability and performance management than ensuring successful workload execution during business hours. Financial services firms are running workloads around the clock, every day of the year, from financial processing, to bookkeeping, to analytics, to reporting, and their timely completion can be just as important to avoid regulatory fines, financial impact, or business impact.

When a workflow fails to execute correctly, there may be any number of issues at play in the environment: multiple business services competing for memory, storage, or CPU; a cluster that isn’t running; or a failure somewhere on-premises or in the cloud. Restarting the job may solve the immediate service delivery problem, but if you don’t address the underlying cause, the problem is likely to reoccur. And each time it occurs, the firm faces risks that range from impaired service availability and customer satisfaction, to interruptions in trading and transactions, to regulatory fines and increased business costs.

To manage performance and availability, ensure resilient service for customers, and control costs, IT operations needs visibility into all the microservices, business services, technology services, and business automation workloads running in the environment.

Delivering actionable insights at the nexus of development and operations

When operations teams have visibility into the workload automation platform, they can understand when and why the workloads that drive business services are experiencing issues, then deliver that actionable insight to developers and service owners to fix the problem for the future. In that sense, marrying operations management to digital business automation is similar to the convergence seen in DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE): bridging gaps and breaking silos with shared visibility across the complete service lifecycle.

Operational observability and actionable insights are essential elements of the evolution to an Autonomous Digital Enterprise (ADE). As firms adopt principles and practices such as DevOps, SRE, automation-everywhere, and everything-as-code, they need tools for visibility and understanding at the microservices level to ensure resilient services for their customers. By understanding the underlying causes of workflow disruptions and then taking effective action to resolve them, they can ensure higher quality for existing services while gaining confidence to move forward with new strategies and market opportunities, from data-driven analytics, to new payment services like FedNow, to new digital service offerings designed to compete with disruptive FinTech startups.

Additional resources

• Financial Service Digitization: Unlock the Power of Automation
• Why Banking Must Evolve to Be an Autonomous Digital Enterprise
• E-book: Streamline the Financial Close Process with BMC Helix Control-M
• How to Orchestrate a Data Pipeline on AWS with Control-M from BMC Software

You can’t solve what you can’t see. Leaky pipes. Faulty wiring. Disconnected infrastructure. Whether we’re talking home repairs or digital transformation, the same principle applies. Even the best tools are nothing without a clear line of sight to consistently monitor performance.

I thought a lot about that reading IDC’s latest research this week. Everywhere you look, financial services organizations are racing to transform by modernizing their infrastructure. The pace is staggering—accelerated by pandemic-related disruption and evolving customer expectations. Still, the numbers around what banks haven’t yet achieved are even more jarring:

• Less than 40 percent of banks can actually see how well their modern infrastructure investments are performing across hybrid operating environments.
• More than 60 percent don’t have consistent service-level monitoring and reporting across hybrid and public cloud applications or services.
• Fewer than 30 percent have gone beyond simple monitoring to implement or optimize automation and orchestration.

That’s simply not enough. It doesn’t matter how powerful your equipment is if you can’t stop trouble as—or, ideally, before—it arises. To unlock the full return on investment (ROI) of a modern infrastructure over the long term, you need a seamless operating system (think of a powerfully automated cloud running behind the scenes) that can monitor your systems, show you how things are going in real time, and help you capitalize on any opportunities that surface.

Getting that balancing act right can create a host of different benefits. IDC tells us financial institutions rank improved customer experience as the number one upside of deploying this kind of operational workload to the cloud. That link between the infrastructure itself, and the broader customer experience (which drives revenue, profit growth, customer retention, and more) is an even greater reason to focus on the operations piece. In fact, IDC’s research shows that when infrastructure is managed well by the right digital operations strategy, it can:

• Improve operational resiliency and reduce risk
• Generate digital trust and stewardship
• Strengthen cybersecurity defenses
• Drive operational efficiencies

As we head into the pandemic recovery phase, it’s fair to say those are the drivers that financial services organizations need now. We don’t know how the next year will look, or the one after that. What I can tell you now is that resiliency, agility, digital trust, and strong cyber protection aren’t going out of style any time soon. By supporting the modern infrastructure with clear operational monitoring, you’ll be better prepared to navigate whatever comes next.

The change of seasons amazes me. I’m always blown away by the earth’s ability to transform so dramatically. In my neck of the woods, it’s those first shoots of green, springing up from the ground—sometimes through the last mounds of snow—that remind me: resiliency really is the most remarkable thing.

I’ve been thinking about resiliency at work, too. Things are beginning to shift, and businesses are starting to wonder what recovery will mean for their people, customers and bottom line. We know resiliency—and our recommitment to building it—will play a major part in the way organizations focus going forward. Embedded well, resiliency enables organizations to respond to the kinds of crises we’ve seen in the last year, in a way that can seem just as magical as the grass starting to grow.

But you know, and I know: resiliency doesn’t happen by chance. It’s cultivated deliberately, and entrenched systematically both across the business, and deep within the culture. A new global survey shows seven out of 10 business leaders across 73 countries say they’re primed to increase investments in resiliency building. That number climbs to nine out of 10 when we look specifically at risk leaders. I’ve got to say, they’re right to do so.

When I look out across financial services in particular, I see great examples of initiatives and programs rolling out now to buoy resiliency down the road. Digital transformation can—in fact, must—play a significant part in generating the kind of resiliency financial services organizations need next. Equally important: if you apply that same energy to helping your customers strengthen their resiliency, you just might differentiate yourself in the market at the very same time.

How so? Resiliency doesn’t only mean closing gaps and vulnerabilities that leave your organization exposed. By flipping the paradigm, and helping your customers strengthen their own resilience, you can set yourself apart as a fintech of choice in a sea of changing competition. I see two fundamental ways digital transformation can help you do that right now.

First and foremost, when you seek to understand the end-to-end business services you provide customers, you can spot any weak links in the chain, and address them. That’s critical. It’s like the principle of ‘help us, help you’. Creating a more seamless digital experience within your own teams, systems, processes and ways of working drives a better end result for you and your customers. That can give them an important lift in the market; one that reflects well on the service you provide.

Those are the kinds of things that deepen customer relationships, and generate the kind of loyalty that sustains an organization through the next crisis, and the one that might come after that. That’s a multi-layered approach to resiliency building that helps everyone run better, even while they reinvent themselves.

What else? Manage your existing services with a platform that provides observability and actionability for the full spectrum of your business services (not just individual applications or infrastructure components). When you have holistic line of site into exactly what’s happening, when, and why, you create an intrinsic agility that allows you to adjust course any time you need.

That allows you to be more resilient to unforeseen circumstances. It also ensures you can continue delivering to your customers, no matter what happens in the broader environment. The right digital connectedness on the back end translates into seamless service for them, on the front end. That distinguishes you in the eyes of customers. It’s one more way you can bolster their ability to be resilient, and keep on keeping on (no matter how stormy the weather). That’s huge.

There are so many opportunities to push your digital transformation forward with connected capabilities that speak right to resilience for you, and your customer. Maybe even your customer’s customer. Build your own resiliency by committing to helping your customers strengthen their own, and you just might uncover a new competitive advantage in 2021, and beyond.

Related reading

• Modern Infrastructure Requires a Connected View
• FinTech: Redefining Possibility by Connecting Talent and Tech
• The Silent Security Threat to Financial Services Companies
• Stay Ahead of Cyber Threats in Financial Services
• Can Your Biggest Disruption Drive Your Greatest Innovation?

The longer we work from home, the more I find myself wondering: what if we used this time to try something truly different? If you’re in the financial services space, you may have had enough newness this year to last a lifetime. Hear me out.

Combining the right technology with the right teams makes the improbable a whole lot more probable. In a market where so much is up in the air, why wouldn’t we seize this remote-working moment to automate in ways that don’t just enable us to react to whatever happens next; they empower our organizations to proactively shape that future?

Automating intelligently can help financial services organizations execute faster with fewer errors. It frees employees up from mundane tasks, while lowering costs and – often times – driving the kind of innovation that actually improves customer experiences. If those aren’t major priorities in 2021, I don’t know what is.

Banks have spent this year inventing, and reinventing, models to tackle the health and economic crises head on. Internal auditors are adapting processes quickly to best navigate the tumult in real time. Regulators are looking hard at standards, and calling for a more fulsome reporting story. Applying intelligent automation across data, workflows, applications, and systems can fuel your ability to deliver better across all those areas, and more. Making your people part of that automation journey takes the potential benefits of doing so to the next level – and engages them at the very same time.

The upside of automation isn’t new to IT professionals. One year ago, 60% of those we surveyed told us their companies were already using automation to complete 25% to 75% of tasks. Even more importantly, 57% of them said multiple departments collaborate on the larger automation strategy. That’s the real key.

If we can bring automation out of the IT friend zone, and use this unique moment in work-from-home history to engage broader internal audiences in its power, we can tee our financial services organizations up to tackle what’s ahead in entirely new ways.

Your people represent a rich pool of possibility in a noisy market ripe with choice, non-traditional competitors, and new entrants. It’s time to automate in ways that give your own teams more time to pull new insight from the data, and channel that intel into powerful solutions and strategies built for tomorrow’s realities.

How can you capitalize on this time to level up both automation and teams?

1. Incentivize. Putting formal frameworks around automation and rewarding leaders and fast followers can spur progress across organizations. Educating people from all departments on the upside of fewer manual and repetitive tasks, and giving adoption credit where credit is due, creates an army of internal influencers. Incentives are a great way to create grass-routes interest in, and support of, automation.
2. Upskill. I don’t have to tell you: working from home can be isolating. There are only so many ways to keep folks dialled into culture and collaboration when we’re spread apart. Using this time to train or retrain employees whose tasks are now automated can further automation, and evolve workforces. That’s not just good for your business; it’s good for your people, too. Creating opportunities to learn and grow as a direct result of automation can turn working-from-home into a more engaging experience that simultaneously bolsters your competitive advantage in the market.
3. Measure. Everyone loves a good news story. Tracking the ways automation is moving the needle using solid metrics is fundamental to the overall success of your automation efforts. That’s how you demonstrate ROI, and secure future investments. Fleshing that story out with compelling qualitative use cases and examples gives the narrative new legs. That makes it more relevant for your people, and encourages others to follow suit.

I see opportunity everywhere – particularly for financial services organizations that refuse to let uncertainty slow them down. Let’s embrace this time to implement the technology we’ve longed to try; to take steps closer to becoming the autonomous digital enterprises our predecessors only dreamed of, and inspire our teams.

After all, if you can’t predict the future, why not go out there and define it for yourself?

Watch the replay of the webinar: DevOps, Data and the Distributed Workforce

Related reading

• Modern Infrastructure Requires a Connected View
• Does a More Resilient You Mean a More Resilient Customer?
• The Silent Security Threat to Financial Services Companies
• Stay Ahead of Cyber Threats in Financial Services
• Can Your Biggest Disruption Drive Your Greatest Innovation?

New Year’s resolutions have never really been my thing. I prefer to take stock of the good, channel that into what’s next, and keep on running. Pair that with my optimistic nature and, well, I tend to see opportunities everywhere – not the least of which come in the form of digital transformation.

We’re just a few days into the blank canvas that is 2021. Wherever your financial services organization stands on the transformation front, it’s time to build on last year’s momentum and get closer to that finish line than ever before.

BMC research we carried out just before the pandemic began showed nearly half of companies surveyed see no specific end date for automation adoption. They view it as a continual improvement project, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Digital transformation itself isn’t a ‘one-and-done’ project. It’s bigger, taking shape as a fundamental shift that reimagines the very way organizations work.

Diving deeper, though, our survey revealed a sliding scale of progress among the other half of respondents. Twenty-three percent said they’re just getting started with automation; 13% are about one-third of the way along. A mere 9% say they’ve crossed the halfway point.

That worries me, not because progress must come quick. Rather, because lagging progress can mean missed opportunities for financial services organizations – especially after the year we’ve just wrapped.

Almost half of financial services employees reported increased productivity during the pandemic. Many of us link that back to the fact that financial services were already more digital when compared to other industries. From providing customer service with minimal disruption to enabling your people to access self-serve IT support: the more digital you are, the better chances you have of adapting quickly in any given scenario. That will continue to be a differentiator for this sector in the year – and years – ahead.

The question isn’t should you resolve to further digital transformation this year; it’s how. What can you prioritize to start closing those transformation gaps once and for all?

1. Remove the manual processes from your operations by turning work into workloads. We’ve been talking about workload automation for years. As the physical space between colleagues and customers widened to a cavernous gap in 2020, those early calls for digital investment became more and more relevant. Using automation to complete tasks releases tremendous potential from within your own teams. Cutting back on manual processes can boost performance, offset tasks tied to focus areas like data processing or app development, dial down human error, and so much more. Automating workflows also helps you spot signs of trouble more quickly. That counts for a lot as cyber risk has continued to spike over the course of the pandemic.

2. Provide governance platforms and services to offer guardrails for innovation, but don’t inhibit technology. Good governance doesn’t impede technology and transformation. It cultivates a rich environment where innovation can thrive. When you’ve got the right IT governance in place, you can align corporate strategy with information technology in ways that help the entire business work better together. At BMC, we’ve always defined strong governance as coming down to leadership, clarity around organization and decision rights, and scalable processes and enabling technologies. Putting the right people in place to oversee governance, connecting the organization, and communicating clearly are equally important as you become a truly autonomous digital enterprise. Doing so enables you to measure results, mitigate risks, and make data-driven decisions along the way.

3. Refresh your tech stacks to modern digital platforms. At a minimum, wrap your legacy workloads with microservices. Whether we’re talking about the front end of your tech stacks (where customers interact) or the back end (where your people deliver), updating yours to make the most of the latest technology is always a good thing. Doing it in ways that tie back into your legacy workloads and microservices is even better. The microservice architecture you choose enables you to deliver large and complex applications quickly, frequently and reliably. That plays a big part in how your organization evolves its tech stack to take advantage of new opportunities in the market with resilient services. Identify the areas where improvement is poised to deliver the greatest uptick, and invest strategically now.

Eating healthier; exercising more… It’s early days yet for the plethora of January goals we tend to set. We won’t achieve any of them without a strong plan. Same goes for digital transformation. If this perennial favourite has been lingering on your ‘to complete’ list, now’s the time. Here’s to a productive, progressive and digital new year for us all.

As the business landscape continues to evolve to keep up with an increasingly remote clientele and workforce, it’s a great time to revisit our discussion of IT security vulnerabilities, threats, and risks and review what financial organizations should be aware of going into the approaching holiday season, which will be a litmus test of our new normal.

IT security, and cybersecurity, in particular, has moved front and center as an ongoing concern with so much of everyday business happening across expanded endpoints and data streams and more bad actors attempting to take advantage of those new avenues. According to KPMG’s recently released Pulse of Fintech study for H1 2020, the cybersecurity market so far this year has already vaulted well past all of 2019 as more companies look for ways to shore up access and establish or transform their privacy controls and fraud detection and prevention efforts. Investments in artificial intelligence and automation are also thriving.

One of the biggest shifts this holiday season, aside from moving mostly online, is that the shopping season has expanded, with Amazon’s annual Prime Day, which was pushed this year to October, marking the unofficial kickoff. Many brick-and-mortar stores are closing their doors on Black Friday to discourage the crowded free-for-alls that typically mark the day.

Instead, Black Friday—which last year generated $7.4 billion in online sales—has been replaced by promotions running from now through the end of the year. That means the spike in money changing hands that used to occur within a narrow window of a few days or weeks is now spanning months. And the touchpoints are expanding, too, with $2.9 billion of last year’s Black Friday online sales happening through smart phones.

So, what’s the difference between a vulnerability, a threat, and a risk?

A vulnerability refers to a known weakness of an asset or resource that can be exploited by one or more attackers, creating an opportunity for an attack to succeed. As an example, ransomware attacks often occur through a vulnerable access point such as weak passwords. When you’re password-protecting your most sensitive data and resources, Infosecurity Group recommends checking user passwords against NCSC’s top 100,000 most hacked passwords.

A threat is a new or newly discovered natural, unintentional, or intentional incident that has the potential to harm a system or your company. This year, that’s meant everything from the extraordinary natural disasters to accidental credential security lapses created by sending your workforce home. Many now-remote employees are using company-issued devices or BYOD (bring your own device) as part of their “one life” device to access work files and shop online.

To head off potential disaster, companies should ensure that whatever device is being used for work is current on all of its security settings, patches, and updates. The pointer above about picking good passwords stands here, too. Also encourage or require VPN use for remote workers when they’re accessing corporate networks.

A risk—loss of money, privacy, or life; reputational damage, and legal ramifications—occurs when a threat exploits a vulnerability. This is the fallout when vulnerabilities and threats are successful. An example of this would be a data breach achieved through email phishing that exposed social security numbers and private financial data. According to Security Boulevard, breaches have skyrocketed this year, with 16 billion records exposed as of August 1^st, and 8.4 billion records exposed in Q1 alone, a 273 percent increase compared to the first half of 2019.

Downtime equals dollars lost, so every moment is precious, especially as we head into what could be the busiest online commerce season ever seen. Financial organizations should already have the latest authentication protocols in place for logins and email access, be conducting continuous monitoring and penetration testing, and have plans in place for data recovery, failover, and cloud backups, etc. in case an incident occurs. Automated solutions that identify, block, and report anomalous behavior are also important tools to have in the arsenal.

Companies should also ensure that staff are trained and up to date on the latest privacy and security protocols to protect both internal data and that of their customers. Empower them to spot and report intrusion attempts like the aforementioned phishing, which can expose system vulnerabilities and introduce viruses, malware, and even ransomware into the network.

Being on guard now, and planning ahead for the likelihood of a vulnerability, threat, or risk during the approaching holiday season can help keep your business on track, so it actually is the most wonderful time of the year for you, your employees, and your customers.

There’s nothing quite like walking into a bank to make you realize how much our world has changed. Standing with my daughter, waiting to open her first account, I felt just how deeply the industry itself has transformed overnight. In the same breath, the change we’ve seen is likely just the tip of the iceberg.

That seed of an idea featured prominently in our recent chat with Stanford University professor and renowned futurist, Tim Chou. We sat down – virtually – for a candid chat about the kind of organizational transformation financial services is experiencing, and most importantly, how to turn that change into opportunity.

The disruption we’re seeing now is more than a moment in time. It’s a catalyst. You can adapt, or you can truly make something of it. How?

This pandemic is a chance to reframe challenges as new solutions. Whether you’re a traditional bank working in overdrive to create better digital experiences for your customer, or a FinTech start-up pivoting to ride the wave of economic shifts: the way we integrate technology, tools and software now is a lot like developing new muscles. Stretch them, flex them, use them. Doing so can help you spot gaps you didn’t know existed, or uncover opportunities to apply them in previously untapped ways.

Same goes for jumping on software development to provide much-needed enterprise-wide connections. As Tim pointed out, from FinTech start-ups to the world’s largest banks: financial services institutions are about as close to being software companies as any business can be. Shifting gears to get to market faster and smarter means first viewing the tools in your proverbial toolbox as a jumping off point for building something better. There’s huge potential in responding to market tumult with strategies reverse engineered from real pain points.

That’s equally true of the way you look at data. Having the right data strategy can drive benefits across functions, from customer experiences to cybersecurity programs. But simply mining the data is not enough. Especially now, you must mine and then refine that data into actionable, insightful plans that enable your team to run while you reinvent. Hitting sought-after status as a truly autonomous digital enterprise means knowing what your data means, and channeling that information into real steps that drive progress for your employees and customers. Doing it in short order can deliver the near-term results that enable you to keep on keeping on for the long haul.

Of course, none of this is possible if you haven’t teed your own people up to move the needle with you. Making the most of your systems and software to enable remote workers, keep them engaged, and cultivate the kind of culture that fuels innovation can’t be an after thought. Investing in the right tools for your internal folks matters just as much as investing in the right tools for your external customers. You can’t have one without the other.

And that’s really the key, isn’t it? Managing innovation doesn’t have to go on the back burner when things get tough. This is precisely when we need to redouble efforts to balance big ideas against budgets, resources, constraints, operational aspirations and time. Celebrating curiosity internally can spur innovation. Backing it up with the best tools can spur innovation that doesn’t just allow you to adapt to change; it fundamentally changes your bottom line.

That trip to the bank was a milestone moment I’ll remember for a number of different reasons. The smile on my daughter’s face as she made her first deposit, to be sure. But also because it was a tangible reminder that the financial services industry will no doubt emerge from the pandemic very differently, leaving me to wonder: what if it could emerge different and better?

Intelligent BMC Helix solutions such as BMC Helix Digital Workplace, BMC Helix Chatbot, and BMC Helix Business Workflows can help financial organizations streamline and automate their processes, delight their customers, and move business forward so they can not only survive but thrive as an Autonomous Digital Enterprise. For more information on capitalizing on disruption to deliver innovation, watch our webinar.

Related reading

• Modern Infrastructure Requires a Connected View
• FinTech: Redefining Possibility by Connecting Talent and Tech
• Does a More Resilient You Mean a More Resilient Customer?
• The Silent Security Threat to Financial Services Companies
• Stay Ahead of Cyber Threats in Financial Services

Delivering a relevant, timely, and positive customer experience across every touchpoint, during every engagement, has never been more important, or more challenging. For financial services companies, that’s meant pivoting to provide service everywhere a customer is, which now more often than not is mobile-first from cell phones, laptops, and tablets instead of physical branch locations. The trick is to make sure customers are satisfied with their transactions at each of those touchpoints.

One way financial organizations can innovate and respond is by evolving to an Autonomous Digital Enterprise (ADE). An ADE is a future state of business, rooted in emerging technologies like automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML), that focuses on customer centricity, agility, and driving actionable insights to strategically deliver new value and competitive differentiators.

The Transcendent Customer Experience, the Data-Driven Business, and Automation Everywhere are three tenets of an ADE that are integral to the success of financial organizations as changing customer preferences and ever-growing data volumes and digital channels place new demands on them to keep up. By leveraging the essential handshake between data and automation to drive actionable insights, financial organizations can rapidly adapt and respond to deliver unique customer experiences.

By deploying new technologies, businesses can create new experiences across the entire customer journey—things like mobile apps, self-service tools, and interactive chatbots. Each of those touchpoints involve customers providing their personal and financial data. Automated data analytics can help make sense of all that data, plus data from social media, customer engagement systems, and more so financial companies can deliver proactive, personalized experiences and tailored offers that attract and retain customers.

Elevating the external customer experience should also extend to the internal customers (employees) who handle that data, many of whom are now working remotely. Empowering frontline employees with the latest technology to perform their jobs and supporting them with automated customer-facing tools allows them to focus on more business-critical tasks and provide exceptional customer experiences when human intervention is required.

Intelligent BMC Helix solutions such as BMC Helix Digital Workplace, BMC Helix Chatbot, and BMC Helix Business Workflows can help financial organizations streamline and automate their processes, delight their customers, and move business forward so they can not only survive but thrive as an Autonomous Digital Enterprise. For more information on building a better customer experience, see our white paper, Superior Customer Experiences Start with Digitalization and Advanced Technologies.

Operational resiliency is a non-negotiable component of the financial services industry. In The FinServ Future, a new Forbes Insights and BMC survey of 300 U.S.-based C-level executives at financial services firms, 65 percent of respondents agreed that their firms are experiencing increased regulatory pressure to deliver seamless, integrated, and secure services without failure.

With the worldwide spread of COVID-19 this spring, the financial markets have hit a level of volatility not seen in over a decade. As companies in the financial services—and really, all—industries look to protect the health and safety of their workforces, it’s vital that the services in place driving that always-on connectivity are secure, reliable, and resilient. With the adoption of social distancing and shelter-in-place initiatives, the availability of online services for both your employees and customers is of utmost importance.

A matter of trust

The study cites identity and authorized usage as leading security considerations. Ed Calusinski, Vice President of Enterprise Architecture at Discover Financial Services, has turned to tech to get it done. “We’ve instituted [Artificial Intelligence] AI throughout our internal processes…to better enable us to deliver safe and sound products to our customers while running in a heavily-regulated industry that requires a high degree of security,” he tells Forbes Insights.

A recent Accenture study, Operational Resiliency is Financial Resiliency, points out that maintaining and improving enterprise resiliency can help you build trust with your customers, regulators, and the economy you serve. It highlights the importance of tech, recommending that technology assets be kept up-to-date to retain currency and mitigate against cyber-threats and older, unsupported solutions.

A global issue

Operational resiliency across the finance sector is a concern that’s also growing internationally, and recent studies acknowledge the importance of planning ahead. Deloitte’s 2019 report, Time to flourish: A practical guide to enhancing operational resilience in the UK financial services sector, asserts that disruptions are inevitable and potentially severe, and the onus is on financial organizations to reduce their impact, not just in how they respond, but by how they prevent and prepare for both severe events and routine disruptions.

In late 2019, the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), the Bank of England (BoE), and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) released Building operational resilience: impact tolerances for important business services. In that paper, Andrew Bailey, FCA Chief Executive, asserted, “Disruptive events can have a high impact on consumers and businesses, so firms and FMIs need to know where [their] risks…lie and [prepare] for any service disruption by testing their planned response.”

As Sam Woods, Chief Executive of the PRA and Deputy Governor of Prudential Regulation, put it. “Operational resilience is a vital part of firms’ safety and soundness,” he says. “[We want] firms to be resilient in their adoption of new technologies.” Those new technologies may in fact be the make-or-break differentiator between businesses that survive and thrive during the Coronavirus pandemic and those that don’t.

Rethinking operational resilience as a business mandate, a 2019 PwC study, highlighted that some of those new technologies can also create new challenges. For example, the growing use of cloud service providers has expanded the security perimeter beyond security controls that were originally designed for in-house data centers.

Overall, the executives surveyed by Forbes Insights are still searching for best practices when it comes to resiliency. For now, they’re tackling those requirements with:

• Cost and vulnerability management
• Collaboration with industry peers
• Increased audits/assessments
• More clearly-defined ownership of resiliency measures

Considering site reliability engineering

Financial organizations could also benefit from establishing site reliability engineering (SRE) groups to bolster resiliency. According to Ben Treynor Sloss, Vice President of Google Engineering and founder of Google SRE, who, quite literally wrote some of the book on it, SRE is, “what happens when you ask a software engineer to design an operations team [who share a] belief in and aptitude for developing software systems to solve complex problems.”

Robin van Zijll and Janna Brummel, site reliability engineers at ING Bank, first implemented SRE back in 2016, and have given talks on their process. In 2019, they provided an update at QCon. “[We] are DevOps within our team. Basically, anyone can do anything, so there’s no real restriction,” said Brummel. “[And we] see…people from the dev side solve issues in a different way than the ops engineers in our team.”

Information sharing is also important. “We facilitate knowledge sharing about SRE topics [with] a meet group, which we call a guild for SREs, where interested engineers from other domains can join and share information…On our intranet, we document ways to improve your operational resilience.”

Predictive technologies

As with the above example from Discover Financial Services, AI is a useful solution for getting ahead of problems before they start. Several of the CIOs surveyed by Forbes Insights agree. Seventy-eight percent of respondents see AI as transformative technology; machine learning (ML) edges it slightly with 80 percent.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) looks at AI in its A Primer of Artificial Intelligence in Financial Markets, and considers it a useful way to, “use data to develop market models and identify risk factors, conduct ongoing market and risk surveillance, and help identify market manipulation, abusive trading, and fraud.”

They point to the predictive nature of AI as particularly beneficial, while also considering its risks. ”A strength of AI is its ability to identify correlations in vast data sets, [which] can be helpful in systemic risk monitoring, which depends on predicting when circumstances may require intervention,” says the commission. “While AI has the potential to enhance human capabilities and experiences…financial market participants should [ensure] AI systems are working as intended, safe…do not generate or exacerbate systemic risk, [and] protect privacy.”

AI research group Emerj recently issued a compilation on how seven of the top US banks are implementing AI. One key takeaway is that AI is currently more pervasive behind the scenes than in front of customers, with 25 percent of AI product offerings in customer-facing functions like customer service, wealth management, and marketing and sales, and 56 percent in risk-related functions like fraud, cybersecurity, compliance, risk management, and financing and loans.

BMC’s solution

BMC can help you meet growing regulatory demands for resiliency with the proper tools and the right technology. BMC Helix Capacity Optimization uses AI/ML insights to help you plan for changes in your business demand, optimize your IT cost and capacity, and balance risk and efficiency. For more information, visit https://www.bmc.com/it-solutions/bmc-helix-capacity-optimization.html.

For more information on resiliency and other issues at the forefront of the financial services industry’s digital evolution, check out The FinServ Future.