Innovation is the Lifeblood of the Financial Sector. Here’s How Observability Helps!

Financial services companies have always been innovators. In an industry where open banking has made it easier than ever for customers to switch providers, innovation is critical to preserving existing revenue streams and creating new ones. I witnessed this axiom in action at 亚马逊 , where we revolutionized cloud services with a strategy of consistent price reductions at Amazon Web Services (AWS) . As we scaled up, prices went down — the opposite direction to other vendors — but this approach relied heavily on deep visibility into our systems’ performance and usage.

Now, I see companies like Splunk taking this concept even further, moving beyond mere visibility to true observability. While visibility shows us what’s happening in our systems, observability helps us understand why it’s happening and predict what might happen next. In this context, data is king.

What is especially exciting is Splunk’s approach to combining public and private data sources. After aggregating vast amounts of customer data, Splunk then applies AI and machine learning to this information to identify patterns and issues across entire networks of customers. This combination is not only changing how we think about observability in complex systems, but revealing why this level of observability is so crucial for innovation in financial services.

How Observability Unlocks Innovation

Since many of the new services in financial services are digital, innovation demands a robust technology infrastructure that offers reliability and high performance. Observability helps financial services companies understand what is happening inside their IT systems by analyzing data from multiple sources, including the cloud and legacy systems, along with systems operated by third-party partners.

Observability tools offer several capabilities that enable financial services companies to continuously enhance their offerings and optimize operations through:

• Timely insights: Instant visibility into system performance ensures quick resolution of issues that could impact customer experience (CX).
• Rapid innovation cycles: Observability enables banks to swiftly deploy new features and monitor their impact, allowing them to continually iterate and innovate.
• Personalized experiences: It also allows banks to analyze customer interactions across various channels, tailoring services to individual needs.
• Root-cause analysis: Enables teams to quickly isolate and understand the underlying causes of problems.
• Predictive capabilities: Customer service teams can use AI to foresee potential disruptions so that they can deal with them proactively.

All of this adds up to a suite of observability tools that gathers and analyzes data at scale, creating comprehensive reports that give financial institutions a deep understanding of system performance and service adoption. This information then guides innovation in a continuous improvement loop.

Financial Services Observability With Splunk

Financial institutions use Splunk’s observability solutions to innovate and enhance customer experiences by providing comprehensive, end-to-end visibility across complex infrastructures. Advanced machine learning detects potential fraud, protecting both the institution and its clients. This transparency serves as a single source of truth, expressed in a common language, that can drive cross-functional collaboration.??

Splunk’s performance optimization and rapid incident response capabilities also enable banks to maintain high service levels and meet regulatory requirements while reducing operational costs, allowing them to innovate efficiently — in other words, remain competitive and resilient in this increasingly digital market.

For evidence of this, we need to understand that observability directly impacts business outcomes by helping institutions understand the significance of outages, the value of software updates, and levels of customer engagement with new features or releases.

Connecting the Innovation Dots

In an industry where the speed and scope of innovation is business-critical, financial institutions need tools that offer more than just visibility. They need actionable insights and predictive capabilities. By tying together data about customer behavior with application performance and cloud infrastructure, observability solutions provide a holistic view of the entire digital ecosystem.?

Investing in observability solutions enables financial services companies to prevent disruptions before they happen. They can also combine the service quality metrics gathered from Splunk and map them against other CX metrics such as CSAT scores, to prove the effect of service resilience on overall CX. Ultimately, observability isn’t just about passive monitoring , but about actively improving operations and freeing up resources for innovation.

Splunk delivers a seamless and reliable experience that keeps financial customers satisfied and loyal. Learn more here about how Splunk's observability tools can preserve and enhance your customer experience.