Meeting Financial Services Application Needs in the Post-Pandemic Digital Age

Application and infrastructure modernization through digitization are the key to financial services firms staying competitive in 2021 and beyond. That’s why you’ve made it a priority to deliver the mobile app user experience and services that end users and customers need and demand.

This landscape of innovative and fast application services delivery in the financial sector is not new. But the post-pandemic age has sped up these trends and expectations as the world further embraces mobile financial transactions. You need look no further than the fact that over 4,400 bank branches closed in the U.S. between 2017 and 2020 — a 5.1% drop from 85,993 to 81,586 — according to a National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) report.

FinTechs have been competitors with financial services firms by meeting digital client experience demands for application services via advanced back end and front-end infrastructure in tandem with the cloud. Those trends have only sped up in the post pandemic era. Keeping up and outpacing them (or partnering with them) means you need to bring your legacy systems in line with modern AppDev and cloud environments.

Overcoming Financial Application Mobility Demands with Legacy Infrastructure

Employee mobility needs and a shift to a divided work week are eminent (50% home, 50% office). This will require your firm to respond to the pressure to be virtual and digital via applications. The challenge is that many of you are still operating on legacy, on-prem core banking systems that cannot be affordably and practically migrated to the cloud.

Techolution has played a big role in helping global financial institutions gain more internal control and deliver application and legacy system integration that gives consumers more control over their finances. These seamless applications deliver fast, versatile, and scalable functions across global firms with hundreds of branches and thousands of customers.

That has translated into practical gains via app and infrastructure development with one of the biggest banks in Southeast Asia by creating an easy-to-use, UX-optimized mobile banking application for its customers. We revitalized their mobile banking platform & updated their existing banking infrastructure. We also determined the key areas for improvement on the back end and the front end.

Financial services firms need to deliver seamless applications and integrated multiple applications for different functions in this post-pandemic time, which requires:

• Unifying customer information across all product lines
• Increasing access and data security
• Implementing a modern application pipeline and integrated cloud platform
• Making it all interoperable with legacy mainframes and technologies too costly to replace

By partnering with one of the oldest banks south of the Sahara, Techolution delivered on those needs by:

• Modernizing the user experience of their digital payments system
• Automating their heavily manual processes around loan capture and approval disbursement to improve customer satisfaction ratings
• Co-developing a modern banking platform with great user experience for mobile overdraft requests, importing/exporting credit facilities with OTP authentication, and biometric authentication capabilities.

Applications in financial services are part of a complex web of people, processes and technology that must work together harmoniously to meet end services and customer demands in the digital, post-pandemic age. But you can’t achieve harmony without delivering the user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) that make application use simple, intuitive, and powerful in ways that anticipate changing demands.

Delivering Real Application UI and UX that Grows the Customer Base

You know your financial institution can only scale and deliver on application demands for end users and customers by improving AppDev, data storage and security. That requires the use of diverse hybrid cloud environments and modern CI/CD pipelines that can quickly deliver services and application updates.

Financial services firms are demanding a better application user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) for their global workforce and customers to streamline processes, lower error rates, and increase scalability. This is true for application services for everything from managing credit debt to payroll management.

We’ve worked with some of the world’s leaders in Payroll Management Services that were dealing with long, costly, and complicated fulfillment processes via their internal applications that resulted in poor usability and subpar mobile and desktop features. We partnered with them to update their outdated interface to deliver greater intuitiveness via a modern UI/UX experience for their apps that puts them steps ahead of their competitors.

By working in partnership with one of the globe’s most successful payroll management platforms, Techolution created a new, refined desktop and mobile application using agile processes with a modern UI/UX framework. We also assisted them in initiating continuous integration, which made releasing new customized features a quick and simplified process.

Benefits of Scalability, Visibility, Flexibility and Speed in Financial AppDev

Scalability that drives value through technology and digital investment in application platforms will be critical for banks moving forward according to a Boston Consulting Group report. This will require your financial services IT and AppDev team to find the fastest, most efficient, scalable and secure means to:

• Unify customer data and product lines
• Increase data visibility across the global financial services enterprise to answer customer questions
• Deliver an exceptional digital experience.

We worked with one of the world’s largest financial services firms with over 30,000 IT employees globally to make that happen. They needed to modernize their legacy-based applications in order to enhance their customer’s mobile user experience and become more flexible from an operational standpoint. This was the only way to keep their position as a banking market leader and remain competitive with agile Fintech startups.

By working collaboratively with their global IT team, Techolution dramatically enhanced all application user interfaces and improved their time to market with greater IT cost efficiencies by modernizing their entire mobile banking infrastructure. They’re now rated as the top digital customer experience bank in the US.

Revenue from global mobile payments are projected to grow from 1.4 billion in 2021 to 4.6 billion in 2025, according to recent statistics reports. You may be focused on banking, investment, insurance or some combination in your financial services firm. In all cases, mobile application development is the key to improving speed of delivery, cost reductions, and customer service. To find out how Techolution can help you with cloud transformation and AppDev that delivers application and infrastructure improvements that benefit the top and bottom line, download our eBook here.