4 minutes
Artificial intelligence tools have the power to build resilience into your credit union's technology platforms across data, security and the cloud.
Even when consumers give 10 out of 10 on satisfaction with their primary financial institution, McKinsey research has found that only 7% of them buy new products there. In the current era of digital banking, traditional metrics like customer or member satisfaction and net promoter score are no longer reliable indicators of an ongoing and profitable relationship for banking, financial services and insurance companies. Today, member experience has become the key service offering and differentiator.
Every aspect of the business—tech or otherwise—must be geared towards delivering a meaningful, consistent and omnichannel member experience. Artificial intelligence for IT operations (known as AIOps) can be an important tool for credit unions to deliver a personalized and differentiated customer experience.
How the pandemic impacted the member experience
As of a 2017 survey, 80% of all customer touchpoints with their primary FI were digital, and this has grown exponentially since COVID-19. For instance, before the pandemic, most consumers used digital channels for everyday transactions, checking balance or payments, and only went to a bank or credit union branch to explore new products or ask for advice. In the aftermath of the pandemic, however, financial institutions have been forced to offer some of the most complex products, such as mortgages, digitally.
This expansion of the digital experience scope presents a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is that credit unions are struggling to replicate the personal touch and trust that face-to-face conversations can build. The opportunity is that digital interactions create a plethora of data—streaming, monitoring and telemetry data—that can be used to optimize these conversations on an ongoing basis. CUs can leverage this to deliver stellar member experiences.
The value of AIOps to the financial services industry
The most fundamental value that AIOps can add to the member experience is in gleaning real-time insights to:
- improve uptime across touchpoints;
- identify points of failure across channels;
- predict potential failures and proactive remediation; and
- optimize infrastructure and application availability based on member expectations.
However, the impact of AIOps does not end with maintaining uptime or preventing failures alone. AIOps has the power to build resilience into a financial institution’s technology platforms across data, cloud and security.
Data
With deep diagnostics and auto-recoverability, AIOps can help a credit union’s scaling data platform run effectively, without downtime, loss of data, etc. It can also help identify anomalies and track data-related incidents, which goes a long way toward ensuring and maintaining the data quality necessary for personalization initiatives.
In essence, robust AIOps offers financial institutions the power to hyper-personalize the customer experience in real-time and across channels, improving engagement and value creation.
Cloud
A similar impact can be seen on cloud platforms as well. Through a sprawling network of tools and integrations built over time, BFSI organizations often end up with an unmanageable landscape of information siloes. In fact, “65% of IT organizations still rely on monitoring approaches that are either siloed, rules-based or don’t cover the needs of their entire IT environment,” according to a 2019 report from AIOps Exchange.
AIOps can act as an invisible layer, integrating the metadata from these tools to offer clearer visibility for consolidation across multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environments. This can help business teams gain a 360-degree view of members and their behavior to design solutions that meet their evolving needs.
Security
AIOps can also play a role in improving security—a strategic prerogative of financial institutions. While security is not often associated with customer experience initiatives, there is merit in focusing on security. Strengthening back-end security as well as member education can help credit unions build longstanding trust and loyalty.
On the back end, an AIOps function can predict and preempt security vulnerabilities through endpoint monitoring, network monitoring, ransomware and malware detection and providing alerts about data breaches, etc. With always-on monitoring, credit unions can feel confident that AIOps will help prevent security breaches—or, in the event of one, that the breach can be quickly identified and isolated, allowing the IT team to address it quickly and effectively. AIOps can also help DevOps teams build more secure applications from the start.
On the member side, AIOps can help identify online banking users who don’t change their passwords often enough or who have compromised passwords. The individuals can then be prompted and provided with tools to ensure they are more cautious. AIOps solutions can also flag potentially fraudulent transactions, request multi-factor authentication and so on.
AIOps can reduce alarm fatigue for IT teams by automating the resolution of events/incidents, and good AIOps can go so far as to predict potential events ahead of time and autonomously perform remediation, enabling a self-healing mechanism along the way. This not only frees up the IT team to focus on more complex and serious problems but minimizes disruption to members, helping to ensure they have a positive experience.
George Thangadurai is CEO at Heal Software Inc., the innovator of the game-changing preventive healing software for enterprises known as HEAL, which fixes problems before they happen.
