The growing popularity of digital banking is evidenced by the tremendous growth in the number of installs and the volume of purchases made on finance apps. Recent data from AppsFlyer has found that finance app installs grew an incredible 183% in H1 2022 compared to H1 2021, while in-app purchases for this category grew nearly threefold over the same period. It’s no surprise then that we’re seeing more traditional banks adapting their services to meet customer demands, such as investing in new digital banking platforms and providing sustainable offerings and digital currency conversions that are easier to use.

While traditional banks are delivering more digital services, they are all heavily promoting their ‘Neo Banking’ alternatives in a bid to attract new customers thanks to their greater flexibility, instant access to cash, and helpful budgeting and cost-cutting tools.

As a result, traditional banks are finding it increasingly challenging to stave off the competition. Not least because moving and innovating at pace is hard for older, larger, international institutions that often have more integrated, complex systems and networks. To put themselves back in the race, they must maintain a high-performance capability across international locations and deliver a seamless, end-to-end customer experience. All while delivering the service innovation that will wow customers.

To achieve this goal, banks need to have observability into all the data across their networks, applications, and end-users to provide actionable insights for the business. It will be instrumental in providing struggling IT teams with a holistic view of their entire ecosystem to identify and resolve complex issues for seamless digital experiences. It will also help banks offer more streamlined and flexible services.

Improving digital service offerings

There is a growing demand for more involved functions to be fully delivered over smart devices and laptops. At present, customers are unable to deposit cheques or money remotely. Similarly, they have to go into a branch to put their signature on a loan. To better serve customers and their evolving needs, banks need to find ways to deliver these services remotely. Developing the right partnerships with technology vendors will be key to this. As an example, DocuSign could be embedded into mobile apps to resolve the signature challenge.

Establishing strong partnerships will also be vital for the personalization of services, which will help traditional banks deliver superior customer experiences and build trust and loyalty. The first step in achieving more tailored offerings is for financial institutions to move towards becoming data companies. In other words, harnessing the information they have about end-users to create more helpful services.

Gaining control over more complex ecosystems

As banks evolve, they will inevitably become more technologically complex. Without unified observability over their entire ecosystems, this could result in myriad network and application performance challenges that would see their new services fall far short of the mark.

Leading the charge to the future of finance

Challenger banks may have had a head start when it comes to digital transformation and moving the dial on customer experience over the past couple of years. However, this needn’t continue to be the case. By embracing unified observability, traditional banks can empower themselves to deliver the digital, personalized services that customers are craving. Not only will this improve brand loyalty and attract new clients, it will also facilitate better personal financial management amid rising living costs. The future of finance is coming, and traditional banks have the power to lead the charge.

F5 SSL Orchestrator: Unified Management of Encrypted Application Traffic: While most traffic and data handled by applications is now encrypted, many security stack service offerings (e.g., firewalls and IPS) are unable to efficiently process SSL encrypted traffic at the scale and speed businesses demand. Beyond mere SSL awareness and offload, F5 SSL Orchestrator provides policy-based orchestration capabilities across the full security service chain for any network topology, device, or application. Orchestration on this level groups devices into services to intelligently decrypt and steer traffic, allowing for independent monitoring, load balancing, and scaling to adapt to changing network conditions and increasing traffic demands. This marks a vast improvement over the industry’s legacy security model, where piecemeal inspection devices perform decryption independently, frequently leaving gaps for attackers. As a dedicated security appliance delivering insight to mitigate threats traversing the network, SSL Orchestrator provides:

• Operational Efficiency – Dynamic service chaining and policy-based traffic steering help organizations intelligently manage encrypted traffic flows across the entire app security infrastructure.
• Full Visibility – High-performance decryption and encryption of inbound and outbound SSL/TLS traffic, enabling quicker threat detection and attack remediation.
• Improved Risk Management – SSL orchestration enables organizations to maximize their investments around malware, DLP, ransomware, and firewall protections, safeguarding user privacy through hardened security with robust cipher management.

F5 Access Manager: New Identity-Aware Access Proxy: Applications remain the principal gateways to organizations’ and individuals’ valuable information. F5 Access Manager protects sensitive data with a Zero Trust model while providing access for authorized users, devices, and APIs, guarding against pervasive threats such as man-in-the-middle attacks. Product features enable organizations to think outside of traditional security boundaries, empowering them to unlock additional business models and operational efficiencies without compromising protections around apps, users, and data. As a secure, flexible, high-performance proxy solution delivering unified global access management, F5 Access Manager provides:

• Streamlined Access Controls – Context-sensitive policies with guided configuration deliver trusted access to users, devices, and APIs for increased business efficiency, while real-time web-form encryption safeguards user credentials and prevents fraud.
• Accelerated Business Innovation – As IT transforms to support continuous deployment methodologies, Access Manager provides a centralized solution for access control, including API authorization. This means DevOps teams can hand off apps to NetOps personnel more quickly, and NetOps can better deliver a consistent user experience without sacrificing manageability.
• Scalability into the Cloud – While SaaS and cloud applications provide numerous advantages, many organizations are choosing not to move all apps off-premises. With advanced F5 Virtual Edition support and high-capacity licensing, Access Manager provides the scale necessary to bridge on-prem app functionality to the cloud, effectively integrating with IDaaS solutions and capabilities to support evolving heterogenous environments.