From providing a near-instant quote for a home mortgage to enabling seven friends to divvy up and split a dinner check via a mobile application, demand and expectations are soaring for finance firms to provide rich and engaging digital experiences. Fifty percent of surveyed high-net-worth clients believe their primary wealth manager should improve their digital capabilities.1 Creating those experiences can be challenging as the underlying infrastructure and interconnected systems grow in sophistication and complexity.
To manage these digital experiences, financial services organizations are utilizing platform engineering. Platform engineers construct and operate internal platforms that deliver self-service tools and automated workflows to streamline the software development process. It’s projected that by 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams as internal providers of reusable services, components, and tools for application development and delivery.2
Platform engineering can be essential for financial services organizations to achieve the following business goals.
Protect Customer and Institutional Funds
While the bot menace and fraud plague all industries, financial services organizations are particularly targeted. However, many implemented anti-fraud measures can disrupt the customer experience and significantly delay those seemingly instantaneous quotes and transfers customers have come to expect. Platform engineering can institutionalize that shipped applications have bot prevention protocols that leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to identify and prevent even the most sophisticated, human-mimicking bots.
Generate Revenue
While the days of stock and commodity trading floors and balancing physical checkbooks have nearly gone the way of the abacus, many financial services firms still generate revenue from trade transaction fees and fractional-reserve loans. Most of those activities are now conducted via web applications running on hybrid and multi-cloud environments that require stable and impeccable uptime. Platform engineering can codify and dispense rulesets for web application firewalls (WAFs) that protect against today’s threat landscape and can easily adapt to thwart tomorrow’s threats.
Meet Compliance
From safeguarding customer personal information to facilitating international commerce, the cloud-native applications, APIs, and containers used by financial firms are subject to some of the most stringent data governance and compliance regulations. To significantly reduce human error, platform engineering erects guardrails to ensure that developers generate, store, and transfer data using tools and workflows that strictly adhere to current regulations. Firms can protect their reputations and prevent expensive compliance violations by enabling developers to use infrastructure-as-code to build secure applications and containers that communicate via a network of APIs.
Delight Customers with Modern Experiences with F5 and AWS
Using F5 solutions, platform engineering can curate ideal AWS development environments for building the secure, reliable, and compliant finance applications essential for attracting and engaging customers. Powered by cutting-edge AI/ML capabilities, F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense blocks and drops malicious bot traffic before it can target customer and institutional funds for fraud. BIG-IP Advanced WAF identifies known bad threats and threat vectors to ensure constant uptime for revenue-generating AWS web applications.
F5 offers a robust solution portfolio that empowers platform engineering to safeguard customer and personal data and improve developer experience with AWS cloud services. With AWS-validated competencies in Security, MSSP Level-1, Containers, and Networking, F5 augments and enhances cloud-native security for many of today’s top financial firms.
F5 solutions are available in AWS Marketplace for easier management, consolidated billing, and a faster time to value.
Sources:
1 McKinsey & Company, US wealth management: A growth agenda for the coming decade, February 2022
2 Gartner, What is Platform Engineering?, October 2022
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