More than three quarters of financial services CIOs believe that the pace of digital innovation is putting customer experience at risk.

A new study from software intelligence firm Dynatrace found that on average, financial services organisations release new software updates twice per working hour, as they try to keep up with competitive pressures and soaring customer expectation.

Nine in 10 financial services CIOs said that they will need to release updates even faster in the future, but believe that the speed of releases can come at a cost. Nearly two-thirds of these financial services CIOs admitted they are forced to compromise between faster innovation and the need to ensure customers have a great software experience.

“Every organization on the planet is a software company these days, including financial services organizations. Market leaders are releasing multiple software updates every second to enhance customer experience. Consequently, the modern approach to delivering software is about agile, fast development cycles and releasing into dynamic, hybrid multi-cloud environments,” said Andreas Grabner, DevOps activist at Dynatrace.
“Yet end users also expect the steady flow of new features and updates to work perfectly, without compromise. The challenge for financial services IT teams is to deliver fast, while moving to a cloud native architecture and maintaining user experience.”

The study found that ensuring cloud performance is not negatively impacted is the top struggle for 69 per cent of CIOs, followed by identifying the benefits of moving to the cloud (57 per cent), understanding if an application is suited to the cloud (57 per cent), and moving legacy systems to the cloud (51 per cent).

In addition, 78 per cent of financial services CIOs said their organisation has experienced IT project delays that could have been prevented if development and operations teams were able to easily collaborate.

“The challenge for all financial services organizations is to get a holistic view of the DevOps pipeline – from code to experience. As DevOps has matured, enterprises are looking to automate and integrate their software development to release faster, with higher quality, and with less manual effort,” concluded Grabner.

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