Following evolutions in information systems, companies in the banking and insurance sectors frequently turned to us to simplify the management of their IT operations. Their goal is to maintain an identical experience for all users, customers and employees and ensure better data analysis to better predict problems.
Analysis by Olivier Hénault and Mathieu Chapuis, Business Developers with Orange Business
The expanding information system
In recent years, two major events have revolutionized working habits across the sector:
- Third-party locations: Traditionally, teams worked together at their local branches; now, however, some European banks have charted a new path by offering their services at new locations, even going so far as to set up stands in supermarkets and cafés. For IT managers, this has led to a dependence on external infrastructure that they cannot necessarily control. The result is increasing complexity in managing the performance of their IT ecosystems.
- The pandemic: Banks and insurers witnessed their teams start to work from home overnight, sometimes even using their own personal devices. This expanded the infrastructure that had to be managed so that employees working from home had the same standards as those in the office; for IT teams, monitoring the performance of IT services became more complex.
These two events have heralded the end of the fixed workstation; employees no longer work exclusively from their desks at their offices with their desktops and landlines. Instead, they have become nomadic, working in open-space offices, in private or public large spaces, or even via videoconference from their homes. This diversity in workstations and devices, combined with the fluctuating quality of Internet connections, has created a very heterogeneous situation for IS and impacts the experience and quality of digital services as experienced by employees and customers.
What does this mean for network managers? It means more complex performance follow-up of applications used via the corporate network or at third-party locations.
Ensuring employees and customers an identical experience, regardless their location
The challenge for IT teams in the banking and insurance sectors is to ensure an optimal user experience that is identical for all users, whether they are customers or employees and regardless of how they access the tools (PC, tablet, etc.).
What particularly complicates this challenge is the fact that demand has never been so high – it is no longer unusual for someone to be a customer of several banks or insurers. Furthermore, the quality of the experience provided – by a mobile application, for example – is unconsciously compared to the quality of all digital tools used every day, financial or not: if things run a little too slowly, customers are immediately tempted to look elsewhere.
Centralizing services for better monitoring
Improving IS functionality and offering an exceptional user experience means collecting and analyzing all available data and any problems encountered. To do this, bankers and insurers have long been using various monitoring tools, each with its own scope. The problem with that is an accumulation of diverse tools for monitoring network infrastructure, data-center infrastructure, cloud solutions, applications, workstations, mobile devices, etc., each having its own dedicated tool. Our clients find themselves confronted with a patchwork of solutions sewn together by a large number of developers, publishers, partners and third-party suppliers…all distributed geographically.
For banks and insurers, the goal is to optimize their IS. But how can they do that? The key is to aggregate all the data collected from their various tools into a single interface for global supervision. This will enable them to better follow up on their IT performance and create more robust user experiences.
Predicting problems using AIOps
Our clients want to go even further by improving all user experiences and IT performance. The stakes include immediate financial gains and additional business, as IT performance is directly correlated with business-application performance. Customer Advisor Representatives with reliable tools can sign more contracts and better retain their customers, regardless of whether they work from home, in a branch or somewhere else. By compiling all available information, operations managers share a holistic view, which enables them to see how the performance of one business impacts another.
But how does this work? It works by using artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) and machine learning, which can achieve the following:
- Real-time analysis of the data from all clients’ IS monitoring tools
- Predictions of problems through an understanding of each system’s normal behavior
Employees will no longer have to open an incident ticket early Monday morning for a weekend performance issue on a router – the problem will have been rectified over the weekend before users even realized it happened.
The need for a trustworthy partner
Service Manage - Watch, our cross-functional customer IT supervision service, serves the specific needs of bankers and insurers. It works by rapidly identifying the possible cause of an incident and uses alerts as predictions to ensure that situations that could impact quality or resulting in saturation can be foreseen.
To implement this kind of cross-functional supervision system, the source of each problem and its knock-on effects must be identified. As a longstanding partner of banks and insurers, Orange Business is familiar with the needs of our clients in these sectors. Thanks to expertise gained primarily through the management of our own information system – one of the most complex in Europe – we can support our clients as they roll out their own cross-functional supervision systems.
Implementing and running a supervision tool of this nature requires thorough knowledge of the specificities of each client. As such, our experts liaise closely with each clients’ various teams to ensure that they understand the subtleties in the architecture of their information systems. We call this principle “supervision in context,” and it is especially important for banks and insurers whose systems are quite heterogeneous through years of gradual build-up and external growth. Managing these situations requires a team of experts who understand both the legacy systems and the more recent solutions to ensure that technologies from different generations remain compatible.
As a Business Developer for Banks and Insurers and Team Leader in Sector-based Business Development, Olivier acts as a liaison between the business needs and stakes of our large-client accounts and our digital integration services and solutions teams in order to offer a tailored approach.