5 June 2018

For many businesses, optimizing operations and processes is a real struggle. Not doing so usually leads to loss of productivity, service agreement breaches and increased costs. For wealth management and financial service providers, success relies on the quality of the service you provide to the end-user. This is why automating your processes through workflows, DevOps and integration is the key to differentiating yourself from your competitors.

What is DevOps and why it matters for your business?
DevOps was traditionally defined as a methodology, philosophy and a set of practices that automates the processes between software developers and IT teams to build, test and release software products more quickly and efficiently. Today, DevOps promotes a more collaborative approach where disparate teams think, work and communicate in a shared language. It now includes cloud, operations and other staff who assist in product development and maintenance.

DevOps gives you the tools to effectively automate manual processes. This is the key to improving workflows and business logic at every stage of software development. Driving automation through DevOps allows your team to work in a continuous cycle, adding extraordinary value to your service, which is then passed on to your end customers.

Using a cloud-based DevOps framework helps organisations improve the quality and speed with which software is delivered, and provides numerous opportunities for automation. By creating shared infrastructure that all teams can access simultaneously, the cloud becomes a fundamental tool in a workplace’s shift to the DevOps way of life.

Automation in action
To understand how DevOps works in practice, let’s look at a common scenario. A financial services organisation wants to update its technology platform to provide a new service offering to its customers. Procuring and equipping the necessary infrastructure will typically take around six weeks. An additional six to eight weeks will be spent building the new environment. This equates to nearly three months of work getting the environment ready, with a linear back-and-forth progression of ideas – development, testing, updates, over and over again.

With a cloud-based DevOps framework, provisioning can take place within a week, and the feedback cycle becomes a continuous process. This way, monitoring product quality becomes easier and faster, and eliminates the possibility of human error causing expensive setbacks. The process becomes much tighter due to the cloud infrastructure enabling teams to regularly engage with one another to improve output, regardless of physical location or proximity to task completion. Consequently, the organisation is able to deploy their new solution in a far shorter timeframe.

Implementing the right cloud-based tools and automating key processes means you can release updates and new services to your customers faster, decrease the risk of development errors, and reduce costs across the entire process.

What value is added by automating and streamlining daily processes?
In an age where “product” is no longer the end goal and “service” is the new standard, financial service providers need to be able to deliver the high level of service that customers have come to expect. To stay ahead and deliver meaningful customer experiences, businesses need to be agile and ready to scale up or down as required.

While automation provides significant benefits to an organisation, one of the most valuable aspects it provides is the elimination of human error. Returning to previous example, during the six to eight-week period of building the new environment, the organisation’s database administrator will be manually extracting data to move into the new environment. In the process, they could accidentally extract personal data, which is an instant breach of privacy laws. Leveraging automation means you can skip the manual input which reduces the chance of errors being made. Having these systems in place will also allow you to mitigate risk and eliminate the painful remediation process.

The more complex your infrastructure, the more opportunities there are for something to go wrong. In the financial services sector, human error can have massive consequences. There are several more specific benefits that automation has for financial service providers. These include:

• Ensuring that your correspondence is going to the right audience
• Financial transactions are being processed in the right order
• All SuperStream messages are processed on time every day

Automating processes to achieve these benefits gives you peace of mind that your customers are getting exactly what they want and expect from you. Further, you’ll be ensuring that these services are delivered to the customer correctly first time, every time.

How to get started
True digital transformation means leveraging the best tools available. Automation is one of the most useful in the proverbial toolbox. Whether you’re looking to breathe new life into existing systems or start fresh with a new one, the best way to leverage automation through workflows and DevOps is to work with experienced professionals. A trusted partner can tailor a solution that suits your business and give your financial service a competitive edge.

For more information, get in contact with us today.