New Relic: The Financial Services CTO Maintaining Success in a Turbulent Environment

The CTO role has largely changed over the past three years, with more than half citing major changes and facing an ongoing wave of pressure.

Specifically, CTOs in the financial services industry must contend with increasing customer expectations, the complexity of open banking, regulatory compliance, and much more.

Whether you are a traditional legacy bank or a disruptive fintech start-up, serving clients and staying competitive requires a certain amount of risk, and as a CTO, you need to demonstrate control. there is.

Here of Fintech Times, Greg Uiyon It outlines how the CTO can manage his work as long as he makes the right decisions and is ready to fund the right investments.

Ouillon serves as CTO for EMEA. new relicis a technology company based in San Francisco, California that develops cloud-based software that helps website and application owners track the performance of their services.

Ouillon helps customers across EMEA adopt the latest technology and digitally transform their business and customer experience. Before New Relic, Greg cita on air, Sita, orange work service When equal.

He managed product P&L, strategy, innovation and transformation, engineering and software development, technology and product lifecycle, service creation and management. He has also led major platform and portfolio transformations, refactoring critical applications, moving to mobile, web and cloud, adopting DevOps, restructuring operational and business support systems, and strengthening security and compliance. . A French national, Uillon is based in Geneva, Switzerland.

In this guest-authored article, Ouillon explains how providing a secure software infrastructure that can meet the needs of ongoing regulatory requirements can contribute to success, and why DevOps teams are empowered by the wider business. Consider enabling and empowering banks to focus on innovation within set parameters. is essential, reducing the risk of downtime due to business-critical issues by providing complete visibility into complex software stacks.

Of all C-level executives, the Chief Technology Officer role may be changing the fastest. Technology is evolving at an exponential rate. To ensure their organization stays ahead, CTOs must adopt technologies and practices focused on acquiring, serving, and retaining both customers and talent.

And no one is tackling these challenges better than financial services CTOs. Not only are they grappling with an ever-expanding world of technological innovation, they must also navigate the ever-changing regulatory backdrop, rising customer expectations and the complexities of open banking.

So while the inner workings of traditional banks and disruptive fintechs can be very different, both CTOs are tied in that they need to finely balance several factors. Each must find the line between delivering rapid innovation and flawless performance and reliability while minimizing risk by aligning digital stack modernization with compliance. This is why his modern-day CTO needs observability to build a strong and reliable infrastructure, fuel bank innovation, and provide 360-degree real-time visibility.

Putting the customer first requires observability

With limited competition until innovative banks emerged, the banking industry had little incentive to focus on delivering customer-centric services and experiences. As the gatekeepers of the financial industry, consumers had no choice but to follow the rules of traditional banking.

But new regulations, especially those surrounding open banking, are creating room for start-up fintech companies. Three years after PSD2 replaced open banking, 300 new disruptor providersand between June 2020 and July 2021, open banking transactions Over 550% increaseThis has changed the landscape for banks, as in any competitive industry, paving the way for a more customer-centric strategy.

Software performance is no longer just about uptime. Customers demand excellent response times and dependable, dependable performance 24/7. CTOs should also consider issues that can affect a customer’s smooth journey and experience.

It is therefore imperative for banks to have real-time visibility into the performance of their stack, from infrastructure and cloud resources to middleware and software to customer devices. Otherwise, customer acquisition and retention may decrease. With more options than ever to unbundle financial services, the power is firmly in the hands of the customer. This certainly brought observability to his CTO’s radar.

Promoting bank innovation

Disruptor banks have seized the opportunity to redefine the customer experience with a new tech stack to the most tangible effect of this competitive banking era.

like a disruptor Starling When Revolute recruits the best developer talent with a focus on building customer-centric apps and services. Modernizing core banking and systems of record has been left to traditional banks. This allows Disruptors to focus on developing a more intuitive and reliable engagement system, providing a simpler and more engaging service experience.

Building services from scratch also means that disruptors do not have to deal with technical and architectural debt, or process and service debt inherited from inflexible legacy IT architectures. This helps you reduce risk, keep your software safe and reliable, and innovate faster.

Observability drives this innovation throughout the software lifecycle. By removing the guesswork, CTOs and their teams can now focus on identifying and fixing problems and friction points using data-driven insights and software telemetry.

The importance of observability for innovation is widely agreed upon. 9 out of 10 IT leaders We believe it is important and strategic for your business. As a result, nearly all executives expect to increase their observability budgets next year, with 20% of them expecting a significant increase.

DevOps team practices are also enhanced by observability. This allows you to continuously measure, monitor, understand and improve your software and services throughout their lifecycle. As we move faster and deploy new software more frequently, we need real-time instrumentation, measurement, and analysis of the software stack at every stage of development.

This is essential to ensure we can deliver reliability, performance, customer experience, and business impact. This same observability allows CTOs to understand exactly how DevOps teams impact the stack and business.

This facilitates the ability to make the right strategic decisions and know where to make the right technology investments that drive continuous improvement across the organization.

Working from a single, shared observability platform also eliminates data and organizational silos, fosters collaboration, resolves issues faster, and delivers consistent end-to-end performance and experience. improve on a large scale.

Building a strong and secure software infrastructure

Both traditional banks and disruptors are looking to grow, despite significant industry changes. However, as with any organization, increasing scale leads to increased complexity in the IT stack. The software must be scalable and incorporate an architecture that can manage growth and meet the needs of ongoing regulatory requirements.

Traditional banks will also need to modernize their existing core banking infrastructure and adopt new cloud platforms while considering new regulations. Digital Disruptors, by contrast, can design and build their engagement systems with these factors in mind. However, to level the playing field, if you want to expand your service portfolio, you will need to obtain the regulated banking licenses that traditional competitors already possess. You will hit a growth ceiling without being able to expand your system or front-facing products.

For CTOs of traditional banks and fintech startups, observability plays an important role. Full visibility into software telemetry reveals exactly how complex and fragmented systems interact to help manage end-to-end service digitization across the stack.

This means that once risky but essential operations, such as moving to the cloud or SaaS, or adopting new microservices and API-based software architectures, are now safer and faster. Reducing the risk of downtime and business-critical issues also helps banks comply with operational resilience regulations, making observability a core part of any modernization or scale-up strategy, whether cloud or on-premises. Make it a component.

Provide a complete overview of your IT stack

Observability gives CTOs a complete picture of their IT stack. The team can collect real-time telemetry data from one central platform to view the behavior and performance of all services, and detect and resolve errors before they affect customers.

Overall, this helps master the end-to-end customer experience and improves every aspect. 42% of IT decision makers (ITDMs) believe: Observability helps digital transformationof 23% say it helps improve the end-user digital experience. In short, observability protects organizations from financial and reputational damage and helps transform and grow businesses.

But more than that, CTOs and their teams gain more knowledge about the health and status of their entire organization. The importance of observability is increasingly recognized by her ITDM across the financial sector. 91% believe it is important throughout the software lifecycle, especially in planning and operations, 25% believe it helps organizations be more cost-effective, and 27% cite ways to improve deployment velocity. I’m here.

CTOs who embrace observability can also provide real-time visibility at the business level. This helps all stakeholders within the company understand the impact of their software and digital services on their business performance.

Observability and CTO: The Perfect Marriage

Financial technology has advanced at lightning speed over the past decade. As a result, the role of the CTO is becoming increasingly important, especially in fintech companies. The pandemic has accelerated digital adoption and ushered in a new era for the industry.

These changes have brought CTOs further into the spotlight and given them the opportunity to establish themselves as major leaders within the financial sector. Observability has the power to help you meet the needs of ongoing regulatory requirements, reducing the risk of downtime and allowing you to focus on business innovation and growth. But the business impact of observability goes beyond purely technical aspects. FinServ is now as competitive an industry for its customers as it is for its employees.

CTOs need to work hard to attract and retain top talent, and a key part of that is providing them with cutting-edge technology that helps them lighten their workload and focus on innovation. . By enabling teams to work faster and smarter, FinServ organizations get the boost they need to stay ahead of their competitors and build cutting-edge platforms. Collaboration is essential to innovation, and observability helps bring teams together.

Now more than ever, it’s imperative that CTOs harness that power.