Article

5 best practices for monitoring multi-channel banking environments

April 17, 2013

We've come a long way from the time when ATMs were simple, autonomous machines that were working — or not. That were serving customers efficiently — or not.

Today a multi-channel, multi-function self-service banking environment creates layers of opacity on top of a transaction and turn identifying a single problematic hop into a time-intensive ordeal.

A new white paper from NCR and INETCO presents five best practices that can help an IT department select a transaction monitoring application — and then get the most from it. The following is an excerpt from the white paper, which is available for free download.

With the proliferation of customer facing technologies, service delivery expansion and back-end integration complexities, IT operations and delivery channel managers are experiencing a greater number of unexpected service latencies and performance issues. There are simply more places a transaction can fail.

The most likely point of unexpected service latencies or outage failures in a multi-channel self-service delivery environment is not within the hardware devices whose technology is fairly mature, but in the handover of transactions from one IT hop (e.g., device, processor, core banking platform, third party service providers, back end connection) to another.

This is why a combination of management solutions that can deal with both device performance and end-to-end transaction performance are essential in establishing a stable multi-channel environment. The powerful combination of device monitoring and transaction monitoring gives you complete, holistic visibility into your critical devices, service applications, consumer transactions and the underlying infrastructure they run on.

It’s not very operationally efficient to have separate monitoring tools for each channel team. Utilizing a transaction monitoring solution can be a crosschannel discussion. It is your opportunity to recast your transaction monitoring technology in a broader context to help build wider operations support for a proposed IT investment.

As a summary, here are five recommended best practices when it comes to monitoring the performance of your multi-channel self-service delivery environment:

Adopt real-time transaction monitoring across all your self-service delivery channels. Without monitoring the transactions themselves as opposed to the hardware or device systems, operators will be blind to slow downs or failures in transactions and unable to trace the source of the problem. Real-time transaction monitoring will enable you to provide consistent levels of service, spot consumer transaction issues as they emerge and become more proactive across all your channels.
Monitor everything coming to and from your core banking system. Look beyond uptime and start using response times, usage patterns, and failed transactions as key metrics. These will help you to identify communication issues between modern applications and core banking systems, and isolate the source of any transaction slowdowns or failed consumer interactions on average 65 percent faster.
Choose a transaction monitoring solution that is highly scalable and configurable. That way you can easily leverage your software investment across all self-service delivery channels, gain a seamless view into all transactions across all channels, and realize a quicker, larger return on investment than if you had a host of silo’d point products.
Ensure transaction-based monitoring is in place before, during, and after new application rollouts. This will help you to reduce risk of consumer disruption associated with new service initiatives, and enable faster deployment of these new services, as well.
Use transaction-based monitoring and analytics to track the performance of external and internal service providers (e.g., third-party web services, bill payment systems, mobile top-up apps, managed hosting providers, core service providers, private cloud environments, co-location facilities, EFT and interbank connections). That way you can reduce blame storms and hold them accountable for their issues affecting the customer experience.

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photo: James Emery