According to Gartner, ”DevOps represents a change in IT culture, focusing on rapid IT service delivery through the adoption of agile, lean practices in the context of a system-oriented approach. At its core, DevOps has had a major impact on a variety of industries and almost every-software powered company. Interestingly, it seems that financial services companies have been the slowest when it comes to transitioning to DevOps. At the same time, financial institutions are at the forefront of digital innovation despite their rigid and traditional procedures which are not easy to alter despite everyday technological advancements. 

Why is DevOps a priority in the financial services sector?

Financial services are increasingly investing in DevOps to reduce costs, improve efficiencies and stay competitive on the market. Bank of America is one of the biggest financial institutions that uses DevOps. 

The main reasons why these companies are turning to DevOps is because it enables consistency, reliability and safety in innovation. On top of this, companies also use DevOps to leverage innovative technologies such as AI and Blockchain to keep up with advances. 

If you are still not sure about the impact DevOps is making not only in Financial services but across industries, check out these important stats: 

The best DevOps teams deploy DevOps 208 times more frequently than WHOM

49% of teams using DevOps report faster time to market for new applications 

99% of respondents of Atlassial Survey 2020 — DevOps trends, report that DevOps has significantly impacted their organizations 

What are the main benefits DevOps brings to Financial services?

Automation of processes

Traditional legacy processes are only slowing financial services organizations. In this new digital era, it is an imperative to be able to bring new products to market to get ahead of the competition. Automation has played a major part here and has been essential for continuous delivery as it increases team productivity and optimizes resource utilization. DevOps makes sure all the processes in the lifecycle of software are automated which then leads to smoother functioning, better visibility, and faster releases while ensuring scalability and compliance. 

Better security and compliance 

DevOps can significantly help financial institutions improve customer experience by reacting to customer feedback much faster, reducing bugs more efficiently and delivering new services and products that create superior customer experience and help companies get ahead of the curve. 

Since numerous transactions are being carried out on a daily basis in the financial services industry, security is obviously a top priority for these companies. There are a number of standards and regulations these companies have to comply with. Institutions which implemented DevOps have proved that this technology has helped them reduce security problems and also identify security threats earlier on and tackle them on time. On top of this DevSecOps has been introduced as an enhanced variant of DevOps which further improved DevOps adoption in financial services companies. 

Cultural collaboration 

In traditional banks, teams can usually be isolated which can cause miscommunication or lack of collaboration which, consequently, may lead to poor results. DevOps on the other hand, brings all the teams together to focus on one goal. Business, development, operations, quality assurance teams are all brought together in one single platform with the mission to encourage them to deliver quality service to their customers. This not only improves their spirit and cultural collaboration but it also enhances the internal functioning of the enterprise. 

Reduced costs 

Ultimately, DevOps can help financial institutions to reduce their costs in the long run through automation of processes and delivering new services and reducing bugs. 

Greater scalability and reliability 

Automation powered by DevOps can help financial institutions scale their operations much more quickly and more effectively. Continuous delivery, for instance, can help ensure that new releases are deployed without interruption and much more smoothly. Through digitalisation and implementation of DevOps, institutions can ensure that their software is reliable and that they can meet their growing customer needs more easily and quickly. 

Reducing downtime to zero 

Infrastructure failures can have an adverse impact on the entire enterprise and can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. These costs can be extremely high in financial services companies and they could not simply afford such failures especially in this fierce cut-throat market competition. DevOps helps reduce downtime through enabling businesses to have a suite of modular and independent services in the form of a software fintech app. Even though you would still have to use microservices architecture to develop such an app, this would help you and your company achieve zero-downtime deployment. Having such an app can significantly help in managing all the delays in deployment and hassles in maintenance. 

Market analysis, research and asset evaluation 

Market analysis, asset evaluation and research may require a lot of time and many calculations with so many databases and feeds. Through integrating business data, formulas, functions and a variety of insights, financial services companies can develop their unique asset valuation formulas and scale them which would allow them to get ahead of the curve in today’s ever-increasing market. 

These companies usually have a number of important analyses running on more computers simultaneously. This is where they need a reliable server-based system since the most critical factor here is maintainability which is beyond all types of cloud deployment and software engineering issues. 

Wrap Up 

To conclude, DevOps practices have an enormous importance for financial institutions and should be leveraged to bring continuous value. It is obvious that in the upcoming years DevOps will play even a bigger part in the digital transformation of Financial services companies and it is time to leverage the benefits DevOps brings to the table. 

You need to act with speed and focus on creating the best results possible. One way to do this is to hire DevOps professionals. And this is where Deployflow can help. 

Deployflow’s team of cloud DevOps engineers are well-equipped with the industry’s best practices allowing them to build an efficient and winning strategy for your business. They can help you speed up your development and get the right expertise at the same time. 

To learn how we help you achieve success feel free to reach us. Our team of experts are there to guide you on this journey, speed up your time to market and get ahead of the curve.