Automation in IT operations enable agility, resilience, and operational excellence, paving the way for organizations to adapt swiftly to changing environments, deliver superior services, and achieve sustainable success in today's dynamic digital landscape.
Next-generation application management fueled by AIOps is revolutionizing how organizations monitor performance, modernize applications, and manage the entire application lifecycle.
AIOps and analytics foster a culture of continuous improvement by providing organizations with actionable intelligence to optimize workflows, enhance service quality, and align IT operations with business goals.
In a world where speed, convenience, and personalization are paramount, traditional banks often fail to offer seamless, real-time services and innovative solutions that meets customer expectations. As a result, they are compelled to embrace digital channels that deeply analyzes, engages with, and truly understands the needs of both existing and new customers.
Digitalization has become an imperative for bank and financial institutions as it leads to better business outcomes, including lower cost-to-income ratios, higher account balances, faster time to market, increased customer acquisition and retention rates.
However, embarking on a digital journey isn’t an easy affair. Besides inefficient and outdated legacy systems, the financial sector has to deal with evolving regulatory compliances that are both time-consuming and costly. Banks and financial institutions need to adopt comprehensive strategies, invest in scalable and flexible technological infrastructures, foster a culture of innovation, and prioritize security and compliance from the outset.
Yet despite all the efforts, according to a 2023 Gartner report, nearly 70% of digital transformation initiatives in the banking sector fail either to achieve their objectives or experience significant delays due to many challenges.
So, what derails these transformations, and how can banks improve their odds of success?
Agile teams work in short sprints, often ranging from one to four weeks. This means that new features, code changes, and updates are constantly being integrated into the software. With continuous integration (CI) pipelines in place, it’s important to ensure that every change made to the software does not result in performance degradation. This is where continuous performance testing comes in action.
By integrating performance tests into each sprint, Agile teams can:
However, integrating continuous performance testing into an Agile environment isn’t always straightforward. Agile teams need to adopt specific best practices to succeed. Let’s look at the top five.
Banks often fail to understand the intricacies and complexities of digital transformation including complicated interfaces, data management, and dependencies across business functions because of which more than 50% of such transformations exceed their initial timeline and budget, leading to budget overruns and missed deadlines.
How to Flip the Odds: Detailed Planning and Incremental Execution
Banks must acknowledge the true complexity of digital transformations by conducting thorough assessments upfront. They need to embrace is an incremental approach to modernization, rather than a wholesale overhaul to prevent budget overruns and operational paralysis. Furthermore, banks must leverage cloud-based applications and microservices that can mitigate risks and prevent budgetary surprises.
Legacy systems, relics of past technological investments, often burden banks with significant technical debt. Moreover, these outdated systems are costly to maintain and hinder the integration of new technologies. Yet many banks fail to account for the time and budget needed to address technical debt when planning their digital transformations.
Forrester emphasizes that addressing technical debt is essential for enabling rapid transformation, even if it does not generate immediate financial gain. Without this effort, legacy systems become an anchor that slows progress and adds complexity to every initiative.
How to Flip the Odds: Prioritize Technical Debt from the Start
Banks need to address technical debt as a core part of their digital transformation strategy. This involves modernizing legacy systems incrementally, adopting cloud-based technologies, and ensuring that technical debt is accounted for in the initial budget. Banks that address these issues from the beginning are better positioned to move quickly and avoid delays.
As Mckinsey report right illustrates that because banks have many legacy IT applications, their technical debt is higher compared with other industries, making it difficult for them to build platforms that supports their digital future (refer to the image below).
Successful digital transformation in banking requires seamless collaboration across business units. However, many banks still operate in silos, leading to conflicting priorities and slow decision-making. This structural misalignment is a key reason why digital initiatives are often delayed or fail.
Without cross-functional collaboration, digital transformations become bogged down by miscommunication, redundant efforts, and a lack of agility. In fact, a Forrester study found that 55% of banks cite internal silos as a primary barrier to successful digital initiatives.
How to Flip the Odds: Build Cross-Functional Teams
Banks must work towards breaking down silos and fostering collaboration across departments by creating cross-functional teams combining business, IT, and operational expertise. Furthermore, banks should embrace intelligent Application Management (iAM) platforms like Qinfinite that can provide unified views of system performance and processes, reducing the friction caused by siloed data and teams.
When it comes to innovation, traditional banks often lag behind Fintechs and digital-native competitors. While Fintechs and Neobanks roll out new features every two to four weeks, traditional banks take four to six months due to their dependency on traditional operating models and limited adoption of agile practices.
The slow pace of change further creates frustration and inertia within banks, causing many to give up on digital transformation rather than confronting the cultural barriers that impede progress.
How to Flip the Odds: Adopt Agile Practices and Speed Up Development Cycles
To accelerate their digital transformation efforts, banks need to move away from traditional development cycles and embrace agile methodologies. For instance, they can break down larger projects into smaller and manageable increments; empowering teams to make decisions quickly, reduce time to market and respond more effectively to customer needs.
Tailor KPIs to Your Use Case:
For example, a financial services app might prioritize low response times for transaction processing, while an e-commerce platform might focus on throughput during high traffic sales events. Customize your performance KPIs based on your specific application and business needs.
Qyrus, for instance, offers real-time tracking of these KPIs, enabling teams to monitor them during test execution and view historical performance trends. This continuous feedback loop allows Agile teams to tweak their systems to ensure they meet business goals.
Gartner predicts that by 2025, 75% of banks will offer digital services, but only 35% will provide customer experiences that meet evolving expectations. Despite investments in digital technology, many banks fall short in delivering seamless customer experiences due to inconsistent interfaces, lack of personalization, and fragmented service channels that drive customers away.
How to Flip the Odds: Prioritize Personalization and Omnichannel Experiences
To stay competitive, banks must focus on personalized, seamless customer experiences across all touchpoints. Leveraging AI and data analytics, banks can anticipate customer needs and provide tailored services that lures them to keep coming for seamless experiences. Banks should also build omnichannel strategies to ensure a consistent experience across mobile, web, and in-person channels to make themselves available on every digital platform.
The Path Forward: Strategic Alignment and Execution
As Gartner aptly puts it, “Transformation isn’t a destination—it’s a journey.” For banks, the key to success lies in charting the right course.
But success requires more than just adopting new technologies. By taking a holistic, incremental approach to modernization, fostering cross-functional collaboration, and prioritizing customer needs, banks can flip the odds and ensure their digital transformation efforts lead to measurable success.
At Quinnox, we understand the complexities of digital transformation. Our expertise in innovative digital solutions and agile methodologies can help your bank navigate these challenges, modernize your infrastructure, and achieve a seamless digital journey.
APIs are the backbone of modern web applications, enabling dynamic content and interactivity. However, differences in how browsers handle API calls and data can lead to inconsistencies in functionality. Implementing API testing within your cross-browser testing strategy ensures that API interactions work correctly across different browsers.
Combining API testing with front-end tests allows you to verify the consistency of API responses across browsers. This is particularly important for features involving AJAX, WebSockets, and CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing). By ensuring that API interactions are consistent, you can prevent issues that could disrupt the user experience, such as data not loading or incorrect information being displayed.
Performance is a critical aspect of user experience, and it can vary significantly between browsers due to differences in rendering engines, JavaScript execution, and resource handling. Incorporating performance testing into your cross-browser strategy helps identify and address performance bottlenecks specific to certain browsers.
Set up performance benchmarks for key user journeys and regularly test them across different browsers. Focus on critical metrics like First Contentful Paint (FCP), Time to Interactive (TTI), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) to ensure that your application delivers a fast and smooth experience on all supported browsers. According to Google, improving FCP by just one second can boost mobile conversions by up to 27%.
Continuous performance testing isn’t just an afterthought—it’s a critical component of delivering high-quality, scalable, and resilient software in an Agile environment. By following these best practices, you can ensure that performance testing is deeply embedded into your Agile workflow.
Quinnox’s, AI-Powered testing platform, Qyrus stands out as the ideal solution for Agile teams looking to implement continuous performance testing. Its user-friendly interface, robust automation features, and scalability make it a powerful ally for any Agile team aiming to deliver fast, reliable, and high-performing software.
Don’t let performance be an afterthought in your Agile development process. Tools like Qyrus make this process more manageable, enabling your teams to focus on what matters most. If you haven’t yet integrated continuous performance testing into your Agile practice, now is the time. Catch issues early, deliver faster, and ensure your users experience the best possible performance every time they use your application.
Connect with Us Today and see how we can help you elevate your performance testing game.
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