At a time when technology is percolating and transforming every single industry in India, the banking and financial services industry too, is staring a massive opportunity that technology presents. Along with this, changes in customer behavior and expectations, complex regulatory requirements, and digitization throughout the business model are affecting the banking and financial services industry at every level.
And technology major Cisco is betting big on leveraging the opportunity the BFSI sector poses in terms of digital transformation.
Cisco has developed a Digital Transformation Blueprint for the banking & financial services sector. The blueprint leverages the power of Cisco’s intent-based networking portfolio to integrate connectivity, security, automation, collaboration, and analytics across the business value chain.
The company wants to deliver enhanced customer experience, improved workforce productivity, build new business models and protect against risks by bringing in connectivity and visibility into every aspect of the organization.
Cisco is working with organisations such as HDFC Bank and the National Stock Exchange (NSE) in digitizing their operations. At the Cisco India Summit in Goa, HDFC Bank showcased its collaboration with Cisco to accelerate the bank’s digital transformation strategy and business growth.
HDFC Bank powered its backend infrastructure with Cisco’s networking solutions to be able to meet consumer expectations, something that is ever-evolving thanks to the proliferation of mobile devices, the digital era and the growth of social technologies.
“Technology transformation in the banking industry is increasingly becoming a competitive edge. The pivotal element of our customer centricity strategy is to deliver a seamless, relevant, secure and enhanced personalized banking experience to our customers. The moment of truth lies in a running service, and we are highly focused to ensure that the digital banking services keep running by deploying many of them in Active-Active Configuration across two physically distinct data centers on the strength of Strong Network Solutions & Intelligent Routing. A robust network is amongst the primary prerequisites of digital banking,” Munish Mittal, Chief Information Officer & Group Head - Information Technology, HDFC Bank says.
HDFC Bank’s data center is built on Cisco Unified Computing Systems (UCS), leverages the performance of the Cisco Nexus® Datacenter switches to reduce cost and complexity through automation, analytics, and energy management. By moving to a virtualized environment, HDFC Bank has significantly improved the speed of application deployments, reduced time for software upgrades as well as lowered its data center footprint. The streamlined and integrated Cisco infrastructure has thus helped enhance efficiency, increase resource availability, security and performance.
NSE too, is leveraging Cisco’s ultra-low-latency trading architecture to deliver high-performance trading experiences, greater control, and visibility to its members. Cisco has also completely automated NSE’s data center, helping it reduce app deployment time from weeks to hours.
“Today financial institutions experience an unrelenting need to be flexible, secure and scalable across increasingly complex data centers. In addition to gaining performance and operational efficiencies, Cisco ACI has enabled the National Stock Exchange to manage it’s infrastructure and data repositories, which is critical when handling sensitive customer and financial data. In addition to that, with AppDynamics, NSE will have complete visibility spanning from the infrastructure to application to end user, thereby offering a superior end-user experience. From a trading perspective, speed, efficiency, and data accuracy are critical for investors,” Sameer Garde, President, Cisco India and SAARC said.
NSE is also leveraging Cisco’s AppDynamics platform to monitor the performance of core applications and get real-time analytics for business performance to deliver superior end-user experience.
Cisco believes that new services enabled by digital technologies can help banking and financial firms to maximize the value they offer to the customers.
In fact, according to a recent Cisco study, these digital opportunities make financial services the No.2-ranked industry in terms of Digital Value at Stake, with an estimated $3.14 trillion up for grabs over the next decade. And Cisco wants to be at the forefront of leveraging this opportunity.