DevOps for the Financial Services Industry

Finance is one industry that demands a seamless flow and the quick delivery of services to keep the business running. Higher customer engagement and continuous transactions make the industry one of the busiest, and naturally requires uninterrupted infrastructure.

Like in every other industry, the technology revolution has transformed the way the financial services industry operates. The industry is striving for an all-round digital transformation and is looking for technology solutions that can help it achieve its goals.

The usage of traditional IT models is causing regulatory hurdles for many firms, and this remains the most concerning factor especially for financial services firms.

As a result, many financial service firms have begun their quest for upgrading technical infrastructure, both at the back-end and the front-end.

Besides just technology advancements, the solution that can offer seamless, faster service delivery and higher customer engagement continue to be the need of the hour for the financial services industry.

And, DevOps has come the way to address the dire need!

DevOps for the Financial Services Industry

DevOps has been the most sought-after solution majorly for its ability to ensure:

• Enhanced Communication
• Increased Collaboration
• Continuous Integration
• Continuous and Faster Delivery
• Process Automation

The same qualities make it perfectly suitable for the financial services industry.

• Automation has come a long way in easing the majority of the internal processes, resulting in effective resource utilization and enhanced developer productivity. Automating key processes reduces the time to market while also ensuring regulatory compliance.
• DevOps Cultural Setup makes it special among other technology solutions in the market. It brings together different teams onto a single platform, connecting all to a single process chain. This creates scope for enhanced communication among teams, knowledge-sharing, and increases a sense of responsibility in every stakeholder associated with the process.
• Security is another key aspect of DevOps. While security tools in traditional models are performed at the end, DevOps brings security along throughout the process chain, monitoring errors and failures at the very instance of the occurrence. This way, quality has been addressed and the recovery time in case of any errors is also controlled.
• Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery pipeline forms the heart of DevOps, making the code deployment easier than ever. Unlike traditional models, the CI/CD pipeline fastens the code deployment by breaking the code chunks into small units. With CI/CD, the tested code undergoes build cycles for automated testing before integrated into the pipeline.

DevOps Market in Finance Services Industry

DevOps has been witnessing rapid adoption across industries. Looking at the industry trend as per the Status of DevOps reports for 2016 and 2017, the technology industry stood as the top adopter of DevOps.

The Financial Services industry stood second with a 12-14 percent adoption rate, followed by Retail (7-8 percent) and Telecom (6-7 percent), among others. 80 percent of financial services companies reported DevOps implementation according to the "Status of DevOps" reports 2016 and 2017, while 14 percent reported doing so in the next 12-18 months, thus contributing to overall adoption rate.

Looking at the increased adoption and the ever-growing potential of the financial services industry, the DevOps adoption rate in the financial services industry firms is expected to grow much further in the years to come.