We are currently in the midst of an exponentially accelerated decade of the twenty-first century, with this acceleration expected to grow organically as generations Alpha and Beta become the main actors in our societies by the 2050s. If two characteristics were to define this era, they would be speed and simplicity.
The banking and financial sectors worldwide have faced numerous challenges and continue to encounter more as the century progresses. These challenges began in 2008 with the emergence of cryptocurrencies powered by Blockchain technologies. The rise of social media applications, driven by artificial intelligence (AI) models, is now putting pressure on banks and financial institutions to adapt to sudden surges in social media financing, fueled by Gen-Z's demand for faster, simpler solutions.
The impact of quantum computing is not expected to be a concern until the late 2030s; however, potential security vulnerabilities are already a focus, requiring increased research into post-quantum cryptographic algorithms. Banks must also prepare for the evolution of Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha, who will not only become the primary customer base but also take on leadership roles in shaping the sector's strategic direction.
Simplified User Experience
An extremely simplified user experience is in high demand from an increasingly impatient generation of consumers. With short attention spans shaped by social media-driven lifestyles, they simply will not tolerate any process that takes more than a few steps.
Steve Jobs, a visionary CEO, anticipated the demands of upcoming generations shaped by social media and AI long before they became reality. He famously emphasized extreme simplicity in the design of Apple’s Mac, iPod and iPad. Today, designing mobile banking, internet banking and open banking interfaces requires experts who understand the psychology of new generations' user experiences.
Banks should seek qualified experts in user experience and user interface design from reputable firms who can create not only an extremely simplified user experience but also meet the evolving needs of Gen-Z and the upcoming Gen-Alpha.
Expedite Onboarding Journey
The onboarding journey acts as the doorbell to the modern banking experience. This process, often guided by a series of screens in a wizard-like sequence, helps new customers register and begin using a mobile banking app, while ensuring that regulatory obligations, such as collecting Know Your Customer (KYC) information, are properly met.
For this process to work with impatient end users, most onboarding steps—if not all—must be automated to reduce the onboarding time to just a few minutes, or even less.
Banks need to leverage highly advanced AI, machine learning and image processing technologies to fully automate the onboarding journeys for their mobile apps, e-banking and corporate customer interfaces. While there are many solution providers, few truly master the integration of advanced technology with a simplified user experience for customer onboarding.
Ease of Deployment
Rest in peace to the days of mainframe-based legacy applications! The era of manually operated end-of-day batch processing, feeding mainframe computers with piles of punch cards, faded away almost fifty to sixty years ago. The client/server command-line scripted deployments are now on their deathbed, succumbing to obsolescence. It is time for fully automated deployments with continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) to become the norm, emerging as a gift by Christmas Eve or ringing in the 2026 New Year.
CI/CD not only automates sophisticated solution deployments, but it also speeds up the overall process, especially the transition from staging to production platforms. Properly implementing CI/CD requires adopting technologies such as microservice architecture, cloud-native design and application container orchestration tools—a suite of technologies that is quickly becoming the de facto standard for modern IT solutions.
Hassle Free Patching
Adopting CI/CD with the technologies described previously also enables hassle-free patching of operating systems, database management systems and application components. Using automated scripted deployment and configuration tools like Helm Charts, Ansible and Terraform allows for accurate, selective patching of different components without impacting the overall solution’s operational behavior or performance.
Zero Downtime Upgrades
One of the most important techniques used in orchestrated cloud-native platforms is the Blue/Green approach for updates and upgrades. This approach solves an issue that has plagued IT operations for decades! While traditional legacy deployment methods often required taking down one or more critical tiers that affected the operational health and responsiveness of a solution, Blue/Green deployment allows new upgrades to run alongside the previous version. This enables upgraded components to be easily adopted or rolled back, offering zero downtime from the end users’ or consumers’ perspective.
Highly Performing Applications
While the world’s population grew from 1.6 billion to 8.1 billion in just over a hundred years, the banking sector’s customer bases surged by over 400 times! This explosive growth has placed immense pressure on IT systems, creating significant challenges for both software and hardware vendors. The demand for performance skyrocketed from 0.2 transactions per second in 1995 to over 2,000 transactions per second by 2020.
As competition intensifies and the pressure to double shareholders' equity continues, the sector’s need for even greater performance keeps rising. The most feasible solution we see is adopting cloud-native platforms with microservice container orchestration—at least until quantum computing becomes a reality and is ready for widespread adoption.
Dynamically Scalable Platforms
In the end, success hinges on adopting a dynamically scalable platform built on cloud-native technologies and container orchestration, fully harnessing these tools to automate, accelerate and scale modern microservice architecture-based applications.
