We recently hosted Red Hat Forum in London. At the event, discussions with financial services experts centered around the theme of modernizing for better business results.

Jon Hammant, DevOps practice lead for Accenture, showcased Accenture’s Extended Reality technology, giving attendees a look at new ways to generate profound personal insights for better engagement within organizations.

Paul McDonald and Dipesh Patel of Deutsche Bank, shared their agile integration journey over the past year. Citing an incremental approach as being key to their success and how they dealt with the cultural challenges that followed, they found that by focusing on automation and integration of their container build process, one image at a time, they were able to expand from banking innovation being a priority for just one team to a decentralized and community-driven approach to banking innovation.

Steven O’Day described the success Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank Group (CYBG) found to create an environment for continuous innovation (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) that addresses the shifting customer experience, supporting intuitive digital banking services with Red Hat’s open source solutions – tightly integrating the front and back office customer experience.

The open source first mindset

One of the afternoon highlights was the financial services panel, delving into the adoption of open source in banks. What started as initial fear, uncertainty and doubt open source for highly regulated services in the financial services industry has evolved substantially in the last several years.

Now, there is an open source first mindset that has driven tangible business value for a number of organizations. This approach is now being used for experiments and innovation in this new era of financial market agility, a far cry from the initial use of open source to reduce costs compared to proprietary UNIX platforms and non-commodity hardware.

One panelist shared their plans for enabling staff to contribute to open source projects, and now they see active contributions to open source communities as a strategic incentive to develop and retain talent in addition to solving complex problems and providing an accelerator to technological innovation.

Red Hat’s Chris Towndrow presented the ‘6 Rs’ of technology modernization and cloud-readiness, sharing his experiences from working with customers to find the criteria associated with successful business cases that can drive modernization. The six Rs as explored as options for these business applications are; rehosting, replatforming , repurchasing , refactoring or re-architecting , retiring and, lastly, retaining . This, and all the other presentations, are available from the Red Hat Forum UK site for your review.

As plans begin for the London FINOS event, I’m inspired – having learned from this event that what was once viewed as strictly outsourcing and cost-driven, the move to open source solutions in financial services can now be seen as a business differentiator.

Building out open source infrastructure and allowing upstream contributions can help financial services attract and retain today’s development talent and can be fundamental to modernization for better business results.

Borrowing the opening lines of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, banks are now in the best of times and the worst of times. Advancements in technology have given rise to changing consumer behaviors and enabled non-traditional players to offer banking services. Asian consumers today are 1.6 to 5 times more likely to transact with their banks via online channels as compared to physical branches. These consumers are also showing interest in using banking services offered by tech companies. For instance, Alibaba’s Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat Pay are now widely used by consumers in China for payments.

The need for banks to deliver exceptional customer experiences is now more important than ever, as customers are becoming more open to switching financial services providers (even if the provider is not a bank) if they found one that offered them a better experience. However, all hope is not lost. By making the right technological investments and adopting more flexible business models, banks have the opportunity to enhance operational efficiency and accelerate innovation in order to improve customer satisfaction and increase revenue.

Continue reading “The new game plan for banks in the digital age”