Crashes, Compliance, Chaos: Modern Challenges for Finance Orgs
The financial services (FinServ) industry is constantly evolving and scaling, with global investment hitting $210 billion in 2022. Digital transformation has brought millions of customers online, and their demand for a smooth, secure, and responsive experience from financial institutions is growing fast.
As the industry grows, challenges are inevitable – it seems like every week there’s a story in the news about an outage or data breach at a financial institution. Let’s explore how observability tools can help financial companies navigate these challenges and deliver great customer experiences and stay competitive.
Key challenges for FinServ Organizations
1. Maintaining Complex Applications
Modern financial applications are complex and distributed by nature. The shift towards microservices increases the complexity of managing these applications – on average, a single web or mobile transaction crosses 37 technology systems. Issues can arise anywhere in the system, so monitoring both back-end and front-end performance is critical, but challenging.
2. Protecting Data Security
Security and FinServ go hand in hand. Customers trust your company with their livelihoods, and thus expect the highest levels of security. Financial institutions store vast amounts of sensitive data, making them prime targets for cyberattacks. You must also comply with strict regulatory standards for financial transactions and for data control (GDPR, PCI DSS). A data breach can cause reputational harm, making your company synonymous with security failure leading to a wave of customer churn.
3. Ensuring High Quality Experiences and Increasing User Retention
Customers are impatient and they want what they want right now. This is especially true for FinServ customers, since people want and need constant access to their financial accounts. Providing your users with a fast and seamless experience is essential to retain them. Studies show 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better experience, and 61% of Gen Z says they would be willing to switch banks for a better digital experience. Unfortunately, financial services often have complex customer journeys, multiple touchpoints, and application performance issues, which frustrate users and lead to drop-offs.
Speed and ease are the top concerns for consumers across the board, whether B2B or B2C.
4. Retaining Talent
Attracting and keeping top developers is a challenge in a competitive job market and demanding work environment. Developer burnout is common – 73% of devs have experienced it at some point in their careers. Burnout arises from several factors, but some of the most common are constant troubleshooting, low-level tasks with negligible impact, and dealing with too much tech debt.
5. Reducing Tech Debt
Speaking of which, when was the last time your system was updated? Many FinServ organizations struggle with tech debt from legacy systems, forcing developers to deal with outdated systems and old code. This slows down innovation, increases costs, and makes it harder to adapt quickly.
How Observability Tools Can Help
FinServ organizations need the right data insights to provide their customers with the best possible digital experience. Observability tools can provide the data-driven insights needed to get full developer visibility, optimize app performance, improve security, and innovate faster. Here’s how it addresses critical challenges:
1. Get End-to-Tnd Visibility into Your Systems
As applications become more complex and distributed, getting visibility into your entire system is critical. With the aid of end-to-end distributed tracing developers can easily see their entire distributed application and quickly identify the root cause of errors and performance issues. SmartBear BugSnag’s distributed tracing is OpenTelemetry (OTel) native and gives teams a customizable framework to monitor everything happening in their system.
Distributed tracing provides developers with a visualization across all microservices touched by their application.
2. Strengthen Security and Ensure Compliance
Security is key to the success of any FinServ organization, and choosing the right observability vendor is part of that. Luckily, BugSnag can track the flow of data and identify irregularities, helping to catch potential security threats in real-time. Additionally, BugSnag offers a world-class, robust on-premises option for organizations that need full control of their data.
3. Enhance User Experience and Boost Retention
Observability tools can proactively detect and diagnose issues across all aspects of your application, enabling teams to resolve problems before they impact your users. With BugSnag’s real-time insights into the actual experiences of current users on the front end across mobile apps and web platforms, FinServ companies can ensure fast, reliable, and seamless service – leading to higher customer retention and trust. For those VIP customers, BugSnag allows teams to prioritize errors so those key users are guaranteed to have a smooth experience – protecting their investment and your revenue.
Developers can track real time performance of app starts, screen loads, and other key metrics to make sure customers are having a smooth experience on the front end.
4. Empower Developers and Prevent Burnout
Observability tools can reduce developer burnout and improve retention by making their jobs a lot easier. With actionable, detailed error reports, BugSnag reduces the manual work of debugging, allowing developers to prioritize high-impact initiatives. Its automated alerting and team collaboration features cut down on context-switching, helping developers stay focused and reducing the risk of burnout.
5. Minimize Tech Debt, Simplify Complex Apps, and Accelerate Innovation
Innovation is one of the most important goals in the financial sector. BugSnag can flag recurring issues and error patterns, helping teams prioritize fixes that reduce technical debt. By freeing up developer resources, FinServ organizations can move faster, launch new features, and continuously innovate without sacrificing system stability.
Conclusion
Like the rest of the world, the financial sector is undergoing rapid digital transformation. The ability to maintain amazing customer experiences, safeguard sensitive data, and manage technical complexity is critical. Observability tools like BugSnag offer the visibility FinServ companies need to tackle these unique challenges head-on, ensuring they can meet the demands of today’s market while driving innovation and growth.
Want to try SmartBear BugSnag free for 14 days with no credit card? Check out our trial here, or sign up for a demo.
