With companies across the world looking to boost productivity, transparency, and efficiency, integrating development and operations teams is a great way to minimize bottlenecks and communication silos.
DevOps offers great speed and security benefits while allowing teams to quickly and efficiently identify and resolve bugs in code. Due to its capabilities, the DevOps market size is expected to reach $12.85 billion by 2025. Although most industries have experienced immense growth in the adoption of DevOps, the banking industry has rather been slow to adoption; but that’s going to change in 2020.
The changing banking scenario in India
The Indian banking sector has come a long way. It used to be an industry that was restricted by strict regulations and a customer base that only needed operations to be secure. Today, thanks to digitalization and consumerization, a lot is changing.
From conventional banking, the sector is quickly moving towards convenience banking with:
- Consumers going digital and expecting mobility: In the last few years, the growth of e-banking and mobile banking has been unprecedented. Consumers today expect to carry out banking operations – anywhere, at any time, using the device of their choice. With RBI constantly forming regulations and providing recommendations to banks to embrace digitalization, capabilities such as electronic fund transfer, eWallets, prepaid cards, BHIM, and UPI-based payment services are no longer good-to-have but must-have.
- Banks looking to drive agility: The rate and pace of competition in the Indian banking sector is immense. With established banks competing with new-age, capability-rich startups, there is immense pressure on banks to drive agility – to survive and thrive. Since it has become very easy for the modern customer to switch loyalty, banks are compelled to embrace technological innovations that help them sustain innovation and stay ahead of the curve.
- Definitions of customer service and experience changing: With consumer apps getting increasingly innovative, customers expect the same kind of sophistication and security in banking operations. Due to this, the definition of customer service and experience is fast changing. Today, consumers expect banks to constantly work towards delivering value while transforming the way they are serviced. They expect personalized support, better customer experience, and extremely high levels of security across operations.
Why DevOps?
Traditionally, the banking industry has been heavily siloed – thanks to the rigid organizational structure and reporting lines. This makes banking systems rather unfavorable for DevOps because of the integration and collaboration levels that the concept demands. However, as developers in the banking to deliver high quality, robust, and reliable production systems, the pace of DevOps transformation is quickly accelerating.
Because production stability has become extremely critical, bringing development and operations teams together is enabling them to build new systems and features while constantly overcoming challenges that have long plagued the industry. Embracing a culture of DevOps can bring about substantial benefits to Indian banks – big and small.
- Better collaboration: DevOps tightens the relationship between developers, IT operations, and security, allowing banks to build reliable services faster through collaborative relationships and transparent workflows. By creating visibility into projects and prioritizing activities based on their significance, it enables teams to work better together and focus on driving value faster. Since every team member has a holistic understanding of individual roles and responsibilities, teams are able to drive organizational knowledge, operational efficiency, and business value – that eventually leads to innovation and productivity.
- Greater agility: In contrast to earlier where banking products and services were physically distributed through branches/ATMs in a brick-and-mortar fashion, today, the adoption of DevOps is allowing banks to transform their distribution channels and the trend towards digitalization. Because DevOps breaks down the silos that traditionally existed in banks, it helps them achieve greater agility and meet the demands of the smartphone-obsessed customer. With DevOps, banks can drive multi-channel interactions while offering a consistent UX across different channels and stay ahead of the competition.
- Faster time to market: Since DevOps improves collaboration between development and operations teams, it is a great way to break down organizational silos. Moreover, it standardizes the framework involved in developing, testing, and deploying applications; therefore, it quickens the overall time to market. This means customers can get new updates frequently and seamlessly, and development teams can significantly reduce the cost and time involved in addressing bug fixes.
- Optimized back-office operations: Banking back-office operations have always involved a lot of data processing activities, most of them repeatable. DevOps brings about a great degree of automation across processes administrative tasks that pave the way for optimization and cost reduction. Through the use of collaboration tools that foster communication, banks can identify system usage, improve response times, and reduce IT sprawls – thus greatly increasing the velocity of product delivery and increase customer satisfaction.
- Competitive advantage: With Indian banks struggling to keep up with the pace of competition, DevOps can also enable banks to innovate, adapt, and grow effectively to achieve business objectives. Since it increases the pace of new releases, it enables a seamless continuous integration and improvement approach to ensure a competitive advantage.
- Better regulatory compliance: In today’s world, the need for banks to safeguard sensitive customer information and comply with the growing list of regulations is more than ever. Since DevOps integrates security aspects early in the development lifecycle, it enables teams to include compliance activities from the very beginning. It helps teams eliminate compliance bottlenecks and bring security, quality, agility, and stability into the software value chain. Due to transparency between teams and more effective collaborative models, banks can ensure consistent quality at all times while defining and tracking compliance.
Conclusion
With digitalization making its way across industries, the global banking sector is expected to spend a total of $11 billion in IT in 2020.
Given the global pace of digital transformation, the Indian banking industry is also opening up to the idea of digitalization and investing in emerging digital technologies to create new product offerings and respond to evolving customer demands with increased agility. If you’re looking to adopt DevOps across your banking organization, now is the time!
