There’s Not a Bank Ignoring Digital, But it Takes DataOps to Succeed

A renewed sense of urgency has moved financial institutions to start pouring a combined $1 trillion into creating digital offerings that will roll out over the next three years. But modernizing technology infrastructure, developing new innovative services, and providing continuity of service are mammoth tasks for banks. And when you’re dealing with people’s wealth, the stakes couldn’t be higher to get it right.

Setbacks are an inevitable part of software development, but data access can make all the difference when it comes to managing CX transformation. While banks collect vast amounts of personal data, that data is often neither easily accessible nor as secure as it should be.

Seventy-two percent of IT executives today say lacking access to the right data creates bottlenecks and hinders top business priorities. That’s because the data that’s needed to fuel innovation is both siloed in legacy applications and infrastructure and increasingly subject to regulations. These factors put organizations without a data-first mindset at serious risk.

Without a reliable data infrastructure in place powered by a DataOps platform, breaches, outages and other malfunctions can be catastrophic to consumer experience and trust. A modern data infrastructure can ensure that banks recover quickly by providing the ability to restore systems to stable states in a matter of minutes.

How It Can All Go Horribly Wrong—TSB Bank’s IT Meltdown

In 2018, TSB Bank in the United Kingdom achieved infamy for the largest banking systems failure in U.K. history after a planned upgrade left millions of customers unable to log into their accounts. Customers experienced issues ranging from incorrect balances to unauthorized access to other accounts. The botched IT upgrade soon became a full-blown crisis as nearly two million customers remained locked out of their accounts, and former CEO Paul Pester said TSB was “on its knees” due to the software meltdown. The crisis persisted for weeks, and at the end of it all, the bank revealed that it had lost 80,000 customers and $431.3 million.

Unfortunately for TSB, this is a prime example of how digital transformation can go wrong. The bank had all the right intentions to migrate customer data to a new IT system fit for the digital age. So how did this happen? Rushed testing and poor communication were said to be at fault for the botched upgrade. In short, they had cut corners with critical IT testing.

Outages Don’t Always Have to Spell Disaster

Data can often be the differentiating factor. DataOps has emerged as a new practice to help enterprise software teams solve the end-to-end delivery of data and enable data-driven transformation. It makes information both accessible and more secure for data consumers, including developers, testers, and analysts, who are responsible for using data in driving new projects. That’s why it can be a game-changer when it comes to preventing operations meltdowns.

Beyond preventing catastrophic outages, a DataOps platform that combines on-demand data delivery with data compliance can boost CX transformation and innovation.

Take Boeing Employees’ Credit Union, the fourth largest credit union and the largest community-based credit union in the United States. The IT organization needed to modernize its data infrastructure to make banking more convenient and secure for its members. For BECU, this meant quickly rolling out enhancements to its online banking systems without interrupting services or compromising security.

A critical challenge slowing BECU down and preventing the company from releasing application updates more rapidly was the lack of a reliable testing infrastructure in which sensitive data was protected in non-production environments. BECU needed a solution that could maintain data consistency and mask Oracle, SQL Server, and other file types across different applications, including CRM, loan originations, and member portal systems. They also needed a way to track masked data across sources and verify that masked environments didn’t contain unprotected confidential data.

A DataOps platform met all these needs. For one, it reduced the overall time and effort required to distribute securely masked data for application developers. The platform also automatically identified sensitive information and consistently masked it across relational database platforms. On one occasion, BECU masked 662 tables, 3,507 columns, and 680 million rows of data in 15 hours, far exceeding the initial requirement that masking not take more than 24 hours.

As a result, BECU was able to meet internal compliance requirements ahead of schedule—taking 6 weeks instead of the estimated 18-24 weeks—and reduce the overall time and effort to distribute masked data. This made it possible to launch new banking products twice as fast for users—a capability that’s particularly critical now, given that customers had to shift to online and mobile banking exclusively since the onset of the COVID-19 crisis.

More Benefits to CX Transformation with DataOps

Ninety-five percent of business leaders now see digital disruption as more of an opportunity than a threat, yet customer experience neglect is driving customers away faster than organizations realize. And when the stakes are as high as they are in the banking industry—with people’s hard-earned money on the line—the approach to digital transformation must be designed to deliver quality applications with compliant data that can be versioned on demand both on-premise and across clouds.

Watch this webinar featuring 451 Research VP Matt Aslett for critical insights on the depth and breadth of CX/EX challenges, and why a smarter approach to DataOps is urgently needed.