This Saturday I received a refund check from my insurance company. After endorsing the check, I opened the banking app on my iPhone to deposit it in my account. Imagine my surprise and dismay when I realized that the app, which was upgraded recently by the bank, was missing the mobile check deposit feature. There was a time when I was accustomed to driving to the local ATM to deposit my checks. Today, after being spoiled by the convenience of mobile check deposits, the prospect of wasting precious leisure time over the weekend was unnerving. It is very rare these days that I carry cash or conduct any of my financial transactions physically at the bank. Instead, I use my smartphone for most of my transactions. The convenience of paying with ease at the push of a button at NFC[1] enabled cash registers and receiving real-time updates of my transactions is extremely helpful and enables me to monitor the veracity of my transactions more efficiently.
Considering the compelling benefits of digital transactions to customers, it is only a matter of time before the use of coins and dollar bills becomes obsolete. The proliferation of online payments and money transfer services such as Paypal and Venmo, shopping online with Amazon and Google Express, NFC enabled cash registers, and the abundance of other online services and payment options will galvanize the digital transformation of financial transactions. As a direct result of this DX, physical assets such as cash will diminish in value and digital assets and information will assume a leading role in driving the value and productivity enhancements in the financial industry as well as many other industries.
As consumers, we would prefer service providers that can offer us the convenience of having access to contextual information in real-time. The natively digital generation of today’s children will fully depend on uninterrupted access to online services. These services will play a pivotal role in allowing companies to redefine customer experience, operational processes, and business models through the continuous development of new digital services. The challenge is that these services need to operate in a production environment and scale to support millions of users. This is why Business Assurance, a process of assuring the quality and performance of service delivery while mitigating corporate risk and optimizing operational efficiencies, is so critical.
Any digital service depends on digital transactions which traverse the service delivery infrastructure encapsulated into IP packets. Many of these transactions originate from apps running on mobile devices and web browsers while others originate from purpose built terminals, such as ATM and NFC enabled cash registers. To gain insight into the performance and security of these transactions, it is critical to develop a scalable Sensor Network that continuously monitors traffic data. Utilizing additional data sources such as xFlow, log files, and synthetic transactions can complement the traffic data to gain a holistic and contextual insight into business assurance. The Sensor Network should be designed for scale to assure service performance as infrastructure grows to support millions of users and petabytes, exabytes, or even zettabytes of data in the future. To this end, NETSCOUT developed the Adaptive Service Intelligence (ASI) Sensor Network. The ASI Sensor Network offers pervasive instrumentation in physical and virtual environments to enable superior business insights and decision making by harnessing the full power of IP Intelligence. The ASI Sensor Network is the topic of our next blog.
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[1] Near Field Communications – a method of wireless data transfer that detects and then enables technology in close proximity to communicate peer to peer.