Enabling Digital Transformation in Financial Services Innovate with DevOps on AWS in highly regulated environments

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Legacy technology, rising regulation, falling margins, increasing customer expectations and globalized industry disruption; these all come together to create a vicious circle of challenges for financial services organizations.

The path that the financial institutions are taking is uncertain, contradictory and ambiguous. As a result, profit margins are suffering. What’s clear is that bold bets are needed to revitalize profit margins. Financial institutions need to be able to innovate constantly to provide customers with high-quality digital products and services across a variety of devices and platforms.

Read on to learn how Contino’s pragmatic approach helps their clients successfully implement DevOps on AWS to give financial institutions the skills they need so they can innovate at speed while remaining secure and compliant.

“This is not a growth sector.”1 That’s what J.P. Morgan recently proclaimed because financial services organizations face a set of wicked problems. Wicked problems are ones that are difficult or impossible to solve because they have “innumerable causes…change with every attempt…and can’t be resolved by traditional processes.”2

1Sarah Butcher, eFinancialCareers, J.P. Morgan’s 14 predictions for investment banking revenues and jobs in 2016 and beyond, January 6, 2016 https://news.efinancialcareers.com/uk-en/230562/j-p-morgans-14-predictions-for-investment-banking-revenues-and-jobs-in-2016-and-beyond

2John C. Camillus, Harvard Business Review, Strategy as a Wicked Problem, May 2008 https://hbr.org/2008/05/strategy-as-a-wicked-problem

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Sparking digital innovation while streamlining compliance

Today, traditional financial institutions struggle to innovate given their monolithic infrastructure, legacy applications, and inflexible, outdated architectures. At the same time, rising regulations and the resulting uncertainty have also caused many traditional financial institutions to invest more in compliance, biting into their budgets for innovation. The collective cost that the US economy bears in complying with federal regulations amounts to nearly $1.9 trillion, a figure that can reduce appetite for risk.1

FinTech companies, by contrast, operate without the burden of decades-old legacy technology. These smaller, born-in-the-cloud companies often have a lower regulatory threshold than traditional financial institutions, which increases their ability to innovate, disrupt the marketplace and compete effectively. These agile companies can offer mobile, online personalized services and build enduring, personalized connections with customers.

1William Dunkelberg, Forbes, The Insidious Cost of Regulation, April 4, 2017 https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamdunkelberg/2017/04/04/the-insidious-cost-of-regulation/#2fb514325c7b

THE CHALLENGE

To compete, traditional financial organizations need to drive up the pace of digital innovation and drive down the costs of compliance.

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Shifting compliance left in a DevOps pipeline

One way that traditional financial institutions can become more innovative and compete with FinTechs is by embracing DevOps: a modern software development methodology focused on breaking down silos, increasing collaboration and using modern development platforms, such as the public cloud.

DevOps can increase the frequency of software delivery and provide efficiencies for your entire organization that streamline compliance processes and save you money. It does this by shifting compliance left. Shifting left refers to the practice of running processes, such as testing, earlier in the development lifecycle. It helps to identify problems early, when the cost and complication of fixing them are low.

By using DevOps principles, you can increase the rate of innovation while building compliance planning and testing into the early stages of software delivery. By shifting compliance left, financial organizations can stay compliant and secure while delivering innovative digital experiences to their customers at speed and scale.

THE SOLUTION

The result? Lower costs. Compliant products. Higher revenues.

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Building agility and innovation with DevOps

Building compliance planning and testing into the early stages of software delivery provides several advantages:

• Increased transparency. DevOps breaks down silos between different parts of your team, so everyone can collaborate and communicate openly.

• Faster updates. A continuous delivery (CD) pipeline optimizes software production so that when a compliance issue arises, it can be addressed immediately.

• Real-time reporting. Internal auditors can research an issue quickly when they suspect a compliance mistake has occurred and create accurate reports for external auditors quickly.

• Automated compliance testing. With automated testing, compliance no longer becomes an ad hoc add-on. Integrated automatic tests increase predictability and mitigate the risk of compliance oversights reaching production environments.

• Greater agility. Regulatory requirements can be ambiguous and can change frequently. By shifting compliance left, regulatory requirements can be deployed much more rapidly and frequently.

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Dual strategies for a successful DevOps implementation on AWS

Contino offers a pragmatic approach that accelerates financial institutions’ successful adoption of DevOps and cloud computing. Its solutions include:

• Convoy: A flexible, automated framework that spins up segregated AWS environments and automated continuous delivery pipelines in less than 10 minutes at the push of a button.

• Momentum: A data-driven transformation roadmap for the successful and accelerated adoption of Enterprise DevOps.

Convoy and Momentum automate infrastructure provisioning and bake compliance and regulations into software delivery pipelines. The frameworks reduce costs by shifting organizations from a capital expenditure (CapEx) to an operational expenditure (OpEx) model. This reduces operating costs, minimizes waste, and increases revenue by launching better, more secure solutions to market faster. With these solutions, financial institutions can:

• Innovate securely with software at speed and scale.• Automate software delivery pipelines.• Deliver solutions at speed while maintaining legal and regulatory compliance.

CONTINO:

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Allianz Insurance

How Allianz became a digital-by-default insurer using Contino solutions

Allianz Insurance wanted to transform itself from a partially agile organization to a full DevOps operating model in the public cloud. The insurance company wanted to completely automate its infrastructure, applications and key processes to ensure that it could offer high-quality, personalized, data-driven digital experiences tailored to their customers’ needs.2

Contino worked with Allianz on a lighthouse software development project. Using Contino’s solutions, they delivered a key insurance quote application in three months, three times quicker than would be possible with traditional methods. Digital delivery is now tightly coupled with business objectives and the new software is already driving increased revenue.

Because the solution runs on AWS, the entire platform and all the applications hosted on it can be moved to another AWS region within three hours. Changes can be delivered through an automated build, deploy and test pipeline in 30 minutes. A completely new microservice can be delivered within an hour. Establishing reusable patterns for software delivery and shifting to an OpEx cost model has lowered infrastructure costs while improving delivery quality, reliability, and agility.

Contino established a DevOps Center of Excellence that enables Allianz to own the skills and talent to independently improve their software delivery capability in the future without relying on Contino.

A DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION CASE STUDY:

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How to get started with Contino for Financial Services

Contino is proud to be recognized as an AWS Premier Consulting Partner. Contino also holds the AWS Financial Services Competency and the AWS DevOps Competency – a testament to our experience and expertise in DevOps in financial services.

Want to know more? Our eBook, Enterprise DevOps on AWS in Financial Services: A Platform for Innovating at Velocity While Remaining Controlled and Compliant, provides insights into:

• Why financial services is not a growth sector• Why AWS is the platform of choice for innovation• How to maximize the benefits of the cloud with DevOps• The importance of cloud-native computing• DevSecOps and security as code• How Contino helped the world’s largest insurer to innovate with DevOps on AWS• Contino’s strategies for successful enterprise DevOps adoption