Network reliability is important for most businesses; it is absolutely critical in banking. It impacts every online service and connection with credit union members and banking clients. While the inaccessibility of applications and systems is problematic for any company, research shows that financial service firms are hit the hardest by downtime. They need Never Down network reliability.
According to a Ponemon Institute report, the average cost of downtime is around $9,000 per minute. That figure covers all industries and sizes of businesses. The industries at highest risk from outage losses are banking/finance, government and healthcare. To be more specific, Statista puts the average cost of a one-hour outage in the banking industry at $9.3 million. You get it – outages are incredibly damaging.
Meeting customer demand is critical
These findings, along with the EY Banking Barometer 2020, paint a clear picture of how important a network reliability is for the banking industry.
The majority of banks (60%) agree that the greatest lever for profitable income growth is improved customer focus.
To meet customer demands, banks need to align their activities more closely to the needs of the customer and away from the product range they offer. This is similar to what large technology firms have successfully done. And, as is true for nearly any business, if the bank or credit union is unable to deliver, if their network is down and banking services are unavailable, clients will shop around until they find a financial institution that is up to their expectations. Competition from digital challenger banks, neobanks and BigTech cannot be ignored.
“Today’s FinTechs are not changing how value is created in banking. However, banks that manage to put customers at the heart of their activities will be the ones that prevail in the long term.”
Olaf Toepfer, Partner, Leader Banking & Capital Markets, EY
Downtime is clearly something that today’s banks and credit unions cannot risk. But how can these firms guarantee a positive client experience through always-accessible services?
Ensuring Access by Preventing Downtime
In its article on Calculating the cost of downtime, Atlassian recommends actions to prevent downtime. One recommendation is to eliminate single points of failure.
Removing single points of failure from your existing infrastructure and processes is one of the quickest ways to reduce downtime and mitigate its costs. This means doing things like load balancing between servers, following good backup practices, and building peer review and technical fail-safes into your deployments.
Connections between headquarter and branches, and to cloud-based resources, should never be single-threaded. No matter how much bandwidth your carrier can supply, a single communication link can always be compromised. That’s why having more than one internet service provider (ISP) is critical to maintaining network uptime.
Ecessa networking solutions specifically meet the needs of the banking industry to ensure that networks are never down. Ecessa’s software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) products enable banks and credit unions to leverage multiple ISP connections so that if one path is down, data can travel along another connection in a seamless manner. This automatic failover means that resources are always available for the bank’s employees and its customers.
For Voice over IP (VoIP) phone services, Teams and Zoom meetings and other cloud-based banking applications, Ecessa provides secure, Never Down® networking with its WANworX® virtual instances.
Financial firms should also practice traffic prioritization and load balancing to prevent network bandwidth from being consumed by less critical actions. And, of course, apply as many security protocols to their networks as possible. These steps represent comparatively small investments that can make a big difference in the long run.
Reducing Costs
Finally, cost reductions and productivity gains are among the top three priorities for banks in the coming year, right behind cybersecurity. This is another area where networking technologies come into play. Banks can reduce expenses by replacing costly private communication links with more cost-effective broadband connections, while increasing bandwidth. They can also consolidate some networking equipment by using Ecessa’s built in Layer 7 Next Generation firewalls at branches to securely offload certain types of branch traffic securely and not backhaul everything through the headquarters firewall.
Today’s customers expect a lot from their financial service providers, including constant, round-the-clock access to online resources. Enhance your member and customer experience with the help of Ecessa technology. Ensure that no matter what, the services they rely on are always accessible.
To learn more about Ecessa solutions for banks, credit unions and other financial institutions, call us at 800.669.6242, email us, or fill out a contact form.