UK bank execs must get to grips with software standards

Only a few weeks into 2016 and HSBC, RBS and NatWest have already suffered outages that have left customers unable to access their online bank accounts or make some transactions.

These are just the latest in a series of IT failures which continue to disrupt and undermine the credibility of these institutions and chip away at what is already a perilously depleted store of public confidence. Still, despite the anxiety these incidents must be causing, it feels like it is only a matter of time before we are discussing the next 'glitch' or 'technical issue' to bring one of these banking giants to their knees.

Banking is a battlefield

• For anyone who wasn’t around for the 80s, any karaoke bar experience virtually guarantees that the Pat Benatar tune 'Love is a Battlefield' comes to mind when anything is called a 'battlefield': banking included.

Sad thing is, when it comes to core banking systems, legacy status means any claim of 'we are young, we are strong, no one can tell us we’re wrong' is laughable at best, an utter lie at worst.

Cashless society – what’s in it for the UK?

Cash: soon to be a thing of the past?

The UK passed a major milestone on its journey to becoming a cashless society last year when it was reported that electronic payments overtook their paper counterparts for the first time. According to the Payments Council, only 48% of payments made by British consumers and businesses in 2014 were in cash, down from 52% in 2013. On top of this, a separate survey found that 71% of British customers carry less than £20 in cash at any time, with half saying that they will walk no further than 100 metres to find a cash machine.

So what’s causing this shift in payment habits and how would cashless benefit banks, merchants and consumers?

A common banking disease that can lead up to $67bn loss in a year: fraud

Fraud is big business, costing the banking industry $67 billion per annum, according to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners. It’s a problem no one can afford to ignore as firms struggle to recover from the global financial crisis and the world’s major economies teeter on the edge of recession. Most worrying of all, its incidence is escalating.

NetGuardians has recently partnered with Temenos to compile a comprehensive e-book, A-Z of Banking Fraud 2016. This e-book outlines the what, why and how of fraud; exploring the size of the issue, who commits it and, most importantly, what can be done.

Application lifecycle management: moving from traditional to agile

Organisations are under an ever-increasing pressure to restructure their teams and processes to match accelerating market dynamics and release faster applications and services; faster release cycles require developers, testers and performance engineers to work in parallel. In addition, they struggle to have visibility and insight across different projects and into the work of distributed teams.

Deploying code and data with manual processes throughout the application development lifecycle are error-prone, expensive and time consuming. Moving code through development environments to Quality Assurance, then pre-production before going live, usually makes up 50% of the delivery effort. Managing of heterogeneous infrastructure of virtual, physical and cloud environment is a tedious and laborious job. 

Customer experience in fintech land

My main thesis for the financial services industry is that finserv = fintech. That is, all participants will have to behave like tech companies and focus on technology, data and customer experience.

Talking about customer experience I had a poor one recently with the bank I bank with – I wish this bank no ill will, yet I would love for them to become service-oriented.