When undergoing a digital transformation, financial institutions need to keep in mind both the needs of their customers and the speed at which they are able to deliver and develop software. DevOps strategies and practices present unique opportunities to achieve these very objectives, while also providing an array of additional advantages.
Building DevOps into financial institutions enables your organization to continually add value and achieve growth over time. A strong DevOps strategy will embrace continuous change and ensure your institution’s ability to be agile and flexible in today’s ever-shifting markets.
If your own financial institution is looking to improve the digital services you are providing to your customers, DevOps is a necessary component for finding not only initial success but continued growth long-term. In this article, we will discuss the process of building DevOps into financial institutions, and why you should consider it for your own organization.
Understanding DevOps
DevOps is the marriage of development and operations in order to significantly increase the speed of delivery of software, updates, and applications to your customers. The practice of DevOps is born out of a combination of different philosophies, tools, and methodologies designed for improving the efficiency of an institution’s services.
Rather than treating development and operations departments as independent and siloed teams, DevOps embraces the philosophy of combining these departments into a larger, more connected team working towards a shared goal or objective.
As digitization only continues to sweep across the financial institution, DevOps has become more important than ever for organizations who are striving to keep up with technological advancements and maintain their edge over their competitors.
The Key Benefits of DevOps
DevOps is useful in many aspects of financial institutions, from improving operational efficiencies to building stronger connections within your business teams.
Here are four of the key benefits that come from adopting a DevOps strategy:
- Faster Deliveries: DevOps allows for the development cycle of software and updates to be significantly decreased, allowing for a much faster speed of delivery. This provides much greater value to your customers and ensures your platform, software, and systems are operating efficiently.
- Greater Risk Reduction: In the world of finance, risk management and reduction is majorly important. DevOps allows for flaws in security to be addressed swiftly, as well as enabling faster patching of bugs and errors.
- Improved Stability and Resilience: DevOps allows for application in production to achieve a much higher level of stability, reducing downtime and increasing recovery.
- Increased Growth: Using DevOps ensures your systems are built for scalability and that your teams are communication as clearly and efficiently as possible. DevOps places emphasis on the importance of collaboration and innovation in order to achieve greater growth.
The 4 Layers of DevOps for Financial Institutions
The reality of software development and delivery for financial institutions is that your clients will be expecting efficient service and frequent new features. As such, your development lifecycle needs to be as optimized as possible in order to provide the greatest value and service to your customers.
There are four primary layers of DevOps for financial institutions that allow for development lifecycles to be decreased and application in production to be stabilized. These four layers are as follows:
- Infrastructure to Code: DevOps requires technical development teams to work alongside machine operations teams in order to enable the construction and coding of infrastructure that allows for applications to be efficient and long-lasting.
- Microservices: Microservices allow for fragments of code to enable functions of applications to exist within their own individual containers. This allows for changes to code to be made without having to adjust the other parts of the system, enabling a much more complex system.
- Build-to-Test: Build-to-test allows for code to be built within a testing tool and greatly change the pace of testing models. This, combined with infrastructure-to-code and microservices, enables CICD, or Continuous Integration, Continuous Development.
- Agile Methodologies: Agile methodologies are one of the greatest foundational pillars to DevOps and aid in ensuring all your Agile teams are co-operating efficiently. Agile methodologies allow for defined deliverables that are easily adjusted or changed when needed.
The Role of Automation
By working together, combined departments that make up a DevOps team can greatly improve the efficiency of your organization by automating tasks that have traditionally been manual and time-consuming.
Enabling automation through DevOps allows for new features and changes to be added quickly in order to achieve greater customer satisfaction. These new features or changes can include:
- Improvements to user experience and interfaces
- New or changed configurations
- Integrations
Automation ultimately allows for the speed and quality of your deliveries to be significantly boosted, a necessary improvement for any financial institution looking to achieve increased scalability and stability using DevOps.
Enabling Omnichannel Banking
Clear communication and regular collaboration are essential components of any DevOps model. Because of this, DevOps is often paired with the implementation of an omnichannel banking strategy.
Omnichannel banking is the process of opening lines of communication across all channels for both your organization’s staff and customers. By implementing omnichannel banking, your customers can utilize all of your services no matter which channel of communication they are using.
DevOps and omnichannel banking work together well due to collaboration being a key element of DevOps. Thus, having the capability to connect with peers and customers quickly and carry out important tasks no matter the channel of communication is of the utmost importance.
Final Thoughts: Building DevOps into Financial Institutions
DevOps is a key element to any development lifecycle. The practices and strategies of DevOps allow for financial institutions to increase their speed of delivery, reduce risk, and improve overall customer satisfaction.
