The Finance industry depends on constant customer engagement, continuous transactions, and flawless infrastructure to keep running. This demanding environment also needs a seamless process flow for faster and optimal results.
The major challenge in this industry is that a few financial firms remain outdated and may not have even started online operations. Others may have just begun to modernize their backend processes and systems on par with the present digital age.
This challenge is coupled with a few other aspects like:
- Tackling legacy systems and code
- Meeting regulatory compliance
- Keeping up with governance requirements
However, lately, financial firms have been proactively embracing technology. One such technology that has brought about a breakthrough in terms of upgraded standards is DevOps. DevOps for finance can roll out faster value to the market. It boosts operational efficiency while mitigating risks. It focuses on improving the cadence and quality of processes while ensuring to meet regulatory compliance and governance requirements, identify risk factors, and other fulfil strategically significant aspects.
Here is a survey to understand the rate of DevOps adoption within the finance industry.
Contino reached out to several financial organizations to understand their levels of DevOps maturity by rating them from one to five. 58% of the respondents rated themselves at three, the companies who rated two were around 27% and three were 31%. Only 14% gave themselves a full rating.
In the next stage, Contino cross-referenced this number with other key metrics of the organization and found that these organizations:
01. Included heavily siloed teams with no repeated processes or manual deployments.
02. Had lesser handovers between teams, some repeatable processes, and a few automated processes.
03. Had separate Dev and Ops teams. They collaborated with a ‘you build it, you run it’ mindset. They also included high levels of automation and repetitive pipeline processes.
04. Had cross-functional teams, native cloud, full CI/CD, and on-demand infrastructure-as-code.
Let us understand in detail about DevOps and its role in the finance industry.
What Is DevOps?
DevOps is an umbrella term referring to the methodology that helps perform operations and maintain infrastructure in the agile state. In a typical service-oriented scenario like a financial firm, this begins right from pitching to the customer until providing continuous support.
In a nutshell, DevOps in the financial space is implemented as a practice to inculcate collaborative and agile functioning of processes. When a financial institution incorporates DevOps, it means the tools and techniques utilized across the organization are aligned and in-sync.
Adoption of DevOps in the Financial Space
Financial products enable the continuous exchange of data. This data is sensitive, regulated, and proprietary. The stakes are high and the success of leveraging the benefits of DevOps depends on adherence to a few best practices by financial firms.
They are:
• Strong Commitment to DevOps Practices
Financial firms keep undergoing internal organizational changes. It is important to ensure that DevOps practices are an integral part of the organization strategy. This way the DevOps enabled-system will keep updating in line with changes that happen in the organization.
• Collaborative Approach
The DevOps development team should collaborate with financial executives to understand their requirements before taking over enhancements or building of a new application. This approach will help the DevOps-enabled system to be beneficial in the long run.
• Maintenance of Appropriate Tools
Financial firms use many tools like the lease management solution to maintain their repository of data. Such tools must have the scalability, predictability, and availability to handle the integration of high-end technologies like DevOps.
Integration of DevOps and Lease Management Solutions
Lease management solutions help categorize and accumulate business-critical data. This comes handy when there is a need to derive intuitive insights and back operational processes or make a quick business decision.
ING is an example of how the banking industry has moved into heavily automated delivery pipelines that include automated security, compliance, and performance checks in addition to common functional tests.
Dr. Daniele Romano, a product owner, elaborates on how they lacked in time-to-market processes and quality. ING adopted a data-based approach to improvement. They developed a tool to measure 50 metrics along with monitoring their complete process pipeline. After the successful implementation of DevOps, over 740 applications now go through a single delivery pipeline.
Here are a few ways in which the integration of DevOps and lease management solutions help:
1. Boosts Productivity
DevOps facilitates seamless communication between teams. There is a faster exchange of ideas that automatically expedites processes and everyday tasks. In a lease management solution, it helps to advance financial, administrative, and legal processes that underpin lease portfolios.
2. Breaks down a Distributed Enterprise Set-Up
A financial organization includes numerous processes with a lot of people involved. The biggest challenge such firms face is to orchestrate these processes, people, and tools across geographically distributed silos.
Such silos result in the lack of visibility from an organizational perspective, fragmented processes, manual handoffs, delays, errors, and a huge lack of governance.
These firms should ensure that they maintain shared control and visibility across infrastructures, tools, and processes.
DevOps breaks down these functional silos, removes friction among teams, orchestrates procedures, and facilitates repetitive and predictable processes that can function with minimal human intervention.
3. Encourages Innovation
DevOps, when integrated with the lease management system, has a trickle-down effect. When productivity increases with the advancement of key operations, it allows room to focus on other key functionalities. The organization becomes prepared to venture into new projects and services, and take new risks.
Teams are motivated to think better, resulting in improved innovation. This helps enhance communication between customers and clients. It helps them handle projects effectively, and obtain more from lease management solutions.
4. Automates Workflows
DevOps enables automation of processes that improve resource utilization, reduce errors, enhance productivity, and better the quality of services. It allows enterprise-scale and cross-project management, which boosts visibility across the organization.
DevOps in lease management systems support the management with critical financial processes on a centralized platform. This helps in ensuring that key processes are optimized, governed, and controlled even as they evolve.
5. Reduces Costs
DevOps comes with a slew of technical benefits. Moreover, it helps to solve issues quickly while reducing deployment time. It streamlines lease management tasks and also saves a lot of time.
Furthermore, it automates key procedures, saving operational costs. It increases collaboration and communication within the organization by automating workflows. This helps minimize the number of workforces allocated to redundant processes.
6. Maintains Security and Compliance
Security and compliance are the top concerns of financial firms. They are often used as the first arguments against modernizing legacy software development and delivery practices.
Despite these concerns, financial lease management solutions backed by DevOps have consistently demonstrated that they mitigate potential problems, identify risks in the early stages, and help address them quickly. They act as a security blanket that enforces compliance and audit requirements.
Wrapping Up
Every organization has different needs and unique demands that must be analyzed and understood before taking the plunge into DevOps. Ensuring that the organization has a strong, ongoing and long-term commitment to DevOps practices will help financial firms build a well-connected system that will help obtain the best results.
