Fast, secure connectivity key to always-on service and better CX

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From your ATM network to mobile app, online retail to the forecourt — your customers expect you to be online at all times and to be able to securely connect to your services

In an always-on world, network security is an organisational imperative. Here’s what financial services industry (FSI) leaders need to know about the network connectivity needed to power future-proof financial services.

There’s no doubt that digital banking, innovation and continually enhanced customer experience are key to the survival of financial services organisations.

Researchers and analysts find that financial services providers are fast reinventing themselves to live up to the expectations of a new, digital generation of customers.

A Microsoft and Worldwide Business Research (WBR) Insights survey on customer experience (CX) trends in financial services found that the pandemic highlighted the critical importance of flexibility, consistency, security and connectivity in the FSI industry.

With customer expectations changing fast, and a mass move to adopting digital channels, most companies in the study leverage smartphone apps, mobile-responsive websites, or both (81%), customer onboarding and feedback automation (62%), and AI-powered predictive analytics (51%). Sixty-three percent of financial services leaders said they were challenged to provide enough self-service options for customers and 66% said their organisations planned to use virtual customer assistants in future.

The 2022 Provider Lens Digital Banking Technology Platforms global report from research firm Information Services Group (ISG) finds that traditional banks around the world are meeting changing customer expectations and competing with new rivals by adopting digital banking platforms. The report finds that consumers increasingly demand the quick, online banking experiences provided by cloud-native banks and that older institutions are catching up by replacing multiple legacy systems with new platforms and services. More than 70% of banks are now moving to the cloud, the report says.

Meanwhile, Deloitte sees cloud as a destination for banks and other financial services firms to support innovation, scale, security and resilience.

None of these digital transformation efforts can succeed without the right levels of connectivity, however. For good CX, FSI players need low latency, reliable and secure networks to enable always-on self-service. To innovate and enable analysis of vast amounts of customer data in the cloud, they also need secure, high-capacity links to support head offices and branches across the country, no matter how remote their location.

One size does not fit all when it comes to addressing the needs and various functions of the FSI sector. For fast, reliable access to resilient, secure connectivity, organisations may require FTTB (Fibre to the Business) with speeds of up to 500Mbps, with low latency and the ability to prioritise certain traffic at peak times.

In addition to implementing networks that enable future-proof financial services operations, FSI organisations also need to consider extending access beyond their branches to the alternative customers’ channels of choice. This can be achieved by zero-rating access to their digital services portfolios. With sponsored internet, organisations can reverse bill the data used by customers on their digital platforms, and at the same time generate a wealth of additional information about customer journeys and engagement.

Many FSI organisations are also embracing Unified Communications and Collaborations (UC&C) systems such as messaging, telephony and conferencing to combine real-time and offline communications across multiple customer and workforce platforms.

Across the entire environment, control, security and agility are crucial, making SD-WAN (software-defined wide area network) an immensely powerful tool to simplify WAN and branch management, and support connectivity without compromise. SASE (secure access service edge) — SD-WAN plus Zero Trust security as an end-to-end solution — supports access through a simplified, cloud-native security service with unified policy enforcement, supporting organisations with multi-cloud requirements.

Tony de Sousa is Managing Executive Financial Services, BCX