Financial firms often underestimate the infrastructure availability and quality assurance effort required to minimise the risk of peak digital banking demand.
On Black Friday 2019, Natwest and RBS suffered performance driven meltdowns, on what is fast becoming a major trading date for UK financial and eCommerce firms alike.
RBS Group, owner of the affected banks, stated “we are aware that some customers are experiencing intermittent issues accessing our mobile and online banking [services].”
These outages follow the UK’s Prudential Regulation Authority assertion in July 2019 that firms “cannot carry on” building on legacy systems from the 1970s.
According to the UK Parliament Treasury Committee in October 2019, “the current level and frequency of disruption is unacceptable.” Speaking for the Committee, Steve Baker MP stated: “regulators must [act] to improve the operational resilience of financial firms [and] ensure individuals are held to account.”
So, these Black Friday outages are not isolated incidents.
Digital banking outages at leading UK firms occur between five and ten times per month, on average. Recent research suggests that the struggle to pay back technical debt is part of the cause.
Technical debt, put simply, is the portion of a complex system that must be rebuilt or refactored to improve stability and defect remediation. But often, remediation is an afterthought.
Software leaders at financial firms thereby need to overcome two key issues: evaluating and addressing operational performance risks; and migrating legacy applications to modern architectures.
Vendors such as Neotys and Performance Lab can enable software leaders to overcome performance and peak load issues.
But ultimately, firms should evaluate the mini versus mini versus micro services conundrum to improve software resilience and business agility.
