Updated: August 8, 2024
JPMorgan, Capital One, and America Express. These are just some of the big names adopting DevOps as an essential tool in their technology kit. Recently, Development Operations, or DevOps for short, has been trending in the financial world. Known for its speed and to-market time, it appears to answer financial organizations’ prayers, ensuring their products meet their clients’ rapidly developing demands. But why choose DevOps for your finance organization? And how does DevOps in finance keep a company up to date?
What is DevOps?
DevOps is the unification of software development and its operations, with a little bit of QA thrown in to ensure quality. It involves a circular set of processes and practices to get a solution on the market faster than ever before. With the Agile Development methodology at its core, the typical project development cycle is an ongoing infinity look which priorities forward-thinking tech. Essentially, DevOps is an ongoing software development process that involves continuous integration, continuous deployment, and continuous delivery at its core.
5 Ways DevOps is changing the financial world
It’s clear that a faster-to-market time allows financial organizations to quickly capitalize on market gaps and address their clients’ changing demands. As a result of the pandemic in 2020, it’s estimated that the global usage of digital financial services is up somewhere between 5% and 20%. With an urgent need to access clients, combined with a reduction in brick and mortar branches, it’s vital that financial organizations are able to get their digital products to the market as fast as possible. DevOps for finance provides a potential solution.
Here’s the five reasons why DevOps is leading the way.
Modernizing outdated systems
Digital banking is nothing new. In fact, according to one source, it dates way back to 1994. However, technology has come a long way since then. Aside from some significant advancements, there’s one other thing that’s built up too – legacy tech. This is the outdated code that some essential services still hang on. While your old tech might be too outdated to work efficiently, it’s not always possible just to throw it out and start afresh. It’s integral to your operations. This is where DevOps comes in handy. It allows you to continuously work to modernize your systems while not jeopardizing taking your business offline to do so.
Alternatively, if you are starting from scratch, DevOps allows you to modernize as you build, adapting to the latest trends without the feeling that your just-released solution is already out-of-date.
Improving security and compliance
In recent years, many within the financial world viewed DevOps as a security risk. Surely, such rapid development left companies vulnerable to compliance and security errors. However, by 2020, this has definitely all changed. Contrastingly to being vulnerable, DevOps aids fintech in staying current and implementing the latest security solutions. Frequent releases address the latest security threats and help stay current with changing compliance regulations. This can be anything from implementing automated document checking processes to securing client details against data hacks.
Increasing transparency
Previously, financial software was developed in isolation following a relatively strict hierarchical process. Participants were working essentially in silos, concerned only with their own area of the task and nothing else, which was great for information security, but created challenges in effectiveness. That has all changed. DevOps in finance requires teams from across the board – QA, engineering, content, compliance, legal, etc. – to participate and work together to ensure the software solution is up to scratch. By drawing expertise from all areas, the solution becomes more robust and effective. Meanwhile, with greater transparency, processes can occur faster and lead to a more successful outcome.
Automating anything that can be automated
Automation is a growing trend. And that doesn’t just concern DevOps for finance technology. By automating repetitive processes, companies are finding themselves more efficient and better able to serve their clients. In the world of finance, automation processes can be developed more swiftly than ever before, allowing your staff to concentrate on delivering customer service, not paperwork. For example, Capital One is automating quality checks in their services and proving that essentially, anything that can be automated will be automated.
Altering the financial industry culture forever
But it’s not just technological processes that are changing due to DevOps. In fact, the entire financial landscape is noticing a change. Industry culture itself is shifting, from top-down hierarchical processes to flexibility akin to Agile development’s adaptable working methodology. So, what does this mean in practice?
Although like any cultural shift, it will take time, the dynamics of traditional finance are being altered in a big way. Overall, the industry is becoming more adaptable and adjusting its staunch approach to finance and exclusivity to greater inclusivity and client-focus. Considering the growth of digital-only banks and greater accessibility overall, and despite brick-and-mortar closures, the industry is surely but slowly shifting.
As DevOps and similar Agile methodologies penetrate the strict world of finance, what we will see is a sure but substantial transformation to a more fitting financial system, adjusted to the needs of the modern world.
DevOps, finance and the future: What’s next?
As the financial world dives deeper into the realm of technology, we are likely to see more extensive usage of DevOps services and a greater connection with customer needs. Client demand will dictate the direction of changes and how quickly they will need to happen for an organization to stay relevant. With the rapid changes that occurred in 2020 due to the pandemic, it’s no surprise that the world is gripped by the potential of shorter software development cycles and the potential they hold for getting solutions out there when and where they are needed.
