In today's digital-centric banking environment, seamless and reliable application performance is a must, directly impacting user experience, customer satisfaction and revenue for financial institutions.
But as modern banking applications become increasingly complex and distributed, traditional Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools – which were originally developed decades ago for monolithic, 3-tier architecture – are no longer sufficient to ensure service reliability and optimal customer experience as they are very focused on code and infrastructure systems.
Instead, leading banks are taking a new approach, leveraging Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) to gain comprehensive visibility into their digital operations, proactively prevent outages and provide an optimal customer experience.
Read on to learn how your bank or credit union can benefit from an IPM-based strategy.
The limitations of traditional APM
Historically, APM tools were designed for monolithic technology platforms and servers running in on-premises data centers. However, this approach is insufficient for today’s applications, which are distributed across multiple clouds, rely on numerous third-party services and API’s, and are accessed from countless device types globally over various network conditions.
To illustrate just how complex and widely distributed modern applications are, consider that simply loading the homepage of a bank or credit card site requires over a hundred separate requests across the internet to multiple sites, fonts, images, applications and services to be completed successfully.
This complexity creates significant blind spots for legacy monitoring solutions. And in the context of digital banking applications, these gaps can lead to prolonged outages, degraded user experiences and frustrated customers – all of which can lead to significant losses for financial institutions.
That’s because today’s banking customers expect seamless and user-friendly digital experiences – and banks that fail to deliver risk losing customers to competitors with superior offerings, notes Gerardo Dada, Chief Marketing Officer at Catchpoint, an internet performance monitoring company who serves some of the largest banks, cloud hyperscalers, online retailers and software companies.
“Users now rely on mobile banking, mobile deposits, payments and payment applications that must be reliable and fast,” says Dada. “The market is highly competitive; a bad user experience can result in users switching for a different provider.”
Indeed, a survey by Salesforce found that digital experience is the leading reason customers switch financial institutions, with 51% of banking customers citing it as their primary motivation for changing institutions.
Along with the risk of losing customers, banks also can face intense regulatory scrutiny when outages occur. Regulators like the Federal Reserve, OCC and FDIC can impose significant penalties for service disruptions that affect critical banking functions, especially when those outages impact customers' ability to access their accounts or complete transactions.
In short, the legacy approach to application performance monitoring is no longer a viable option for financial institutions that want to ensure they’re offering the speedy, seamless and reliable digital banking experiences today’s employees, consumers and regulators demand. This is why a superior approach, Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM), is necessary.
Digital resilience for banks: The IPM advantage
While traditional APM focuses primarily on internal application metrics (logs, infrastructure metrics and traces) and basic synthetics focused on QA, Internet Performance Monitoring takes a fundamentally different approach by monitoring the entire digital delivery chain from an outside-in perspective with a focus on user and system experience.
For financial institutions, this distinction is crucial to maintaining reliability of the full range of their critical banking systems – from mobile apps to in-branch teller software – by providing a unified view of performance across all digital channels. This complete visibility simply isn’t possible with a legacy APM approach.
“Traditional tools do not have awareness of routing, DNS, APIs, or connectivity issues that may be impacting users in one city, or a set of branches that rely on a particular connectivity provider in one state,” notes Dada. “They are unable to understand how the complex and fragile internet delivery chain works across clouds, services and networks – all the way to the intended user whether, a teller in a bank, a trader in an office, or a user on a mobile device.”
To provide a complete and accurate picture of user experience across all relevant systems, Catchpoint operates the world’s largest intelligent agent network, with thousands of agents in over 100 countries covering cloud, backbone, wireless, last-mile and enterprise agents which can be deployed inside offices, datacenters, or branches.
This outside-in perspective reveals issues that traditional APM simply cannot detect — from ISP outages affecting specific customer segments to CDN performance problems or DNS routing issues. For banks, whose digital services must perform flawlessly across online banking platforms, mobile apps, branch networks and ATM systems, these insights are invaluable.
IPM enhances digital resilience across the entire banking ecosystem: ensuring consistent SASE/VPN connectivity for remote employees, optimizing data center and cloud performance, monitoring the digital experience for traders and tellers and validating the performance of all customer-facing applications. And just as importantly, it extends monitoring to critical dependencies like credit bureaus, mortgage processing partners and payment gateways that traditional APM tools can't reach.
Mitigating disruptions with proactive monitoring
Along with providing banks with a complete visibility scope, Catchpoint’s platform also offers comprehensive proactive monitoring capabilities that ensure any potential issues are immediately visible, enabling banks to respond quickly and minimize customer impact.
Catchpoint leverages advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning to enable this proactive performance monitoring. The platform continuously analyzes patterns across billions of data points, identifying potential issues before they impact users.
This predictive capability represents a fundamental shift from reactive troubleshooting to proactive optimization, allowing organizations to address issues before they affect customer experience. By analyzing historical performance data, identifying patterns and detecting anomalies, Catchpoint's system can alert teams to emerging issues before they become critical.
“Proactive monitoring allows IT operations teams to be the first to know when problems arise and give them the opportunity to fix problems before the business is impacted,” says Dada. “Without proactive monitoring, organizations often wait until customers or branch managers complain either via a support call or through social media in order to be aware of a problem, which then triggers a fire drill or war room to confirm the problem and then start looking for the root cause.
“A proactive system, especially with the help of AI-powered analysis, alerts IT when a trend is likely to create an issue for users, and can point to the likely root cause, giving IT the best chance to solve the issue with minimum impact,” Dada notes.
By providing a holistic, proactive view of the entire digital delivery chain, IPM empowers banks to deliver consistent, high-quality experiences across all channels – offering the reliability and performance standards today’s customers and regulators demand and helping ensure ongoing digital resilience as the banking landscape continues to evolve.
To learn more about IPM, visit Catchpoint.
