Banking on an adaptive network for customer experience innovation: Part 1

Today, the demand for evolution in financial services continues to reach new highs. This demand stems not just from today’s digital consumer with an insatiable appetite for a more robust and agile customer experience from digital banking services; but, also from the needs of the business community.

Stringent financial regulations, fierce market competition from new Fintechs, and the need to infuse new technology into business practices and services are transforming the financial services sector in ways never seen before. It’s an era of customer experience (or CX) transformation and one that requires thinking about a financial services organization as an “adaptive enterprise.”

Fundamentally, an adaptive enterprise is one that continuously evolves, incorporating not just the latest and greatest technologies that empower customer experience transformation; but, also predicting the future needs of the financial institution and customers they serve.

It’s logical then that the network infrastructure which powers an adaptive enterprise should also be adaptable.

The adaptive network

So what kind of networking technology can adapt to rapidly changing conditions?

Software-defined networks which are designed to manage the application layer and control the flow of data based on data type and function, are evolving, and pushing the envelope of the adaptive network’s capabilities. A software-defined network is now able to analyse the application data in near real-time and provide logical improvements to the processing of that data.

In essence, the network is adapting to the requirements of the evolving demands for a better customer experience. What the future will bring is a network that has the ability to think for itself in a multi-dimensional state. As such, it is able to predict the changes necessary to evolve based not solely on the demands of the network, but also on the demands of the consumer for a better customer experience. This networking evolution represents an industry sea change.

In the second part of this blog I’ll look at how access to vast quantities of data is helping tailor digital banking services to enhance the customer experience and what increasing transformation means for the future of cybersecurity in financial services.