Institutional Investment Bank Assures Customer Experience with Online Banking Services

Customer Profile

This U.S.-based, international institutional investment bank has been serving customers for over a hundred years. Today, the bank operates in more than a couple dozen countries and has operations in 100 global locations. Thousands of the bank’s employees service a portfolio of over several billion dollars in assets under management. Surviving and thriving in the competitive financial industry this long has depended on digital transformation in delivering superior services to clients.

Business Challenge

Because this institutional bank primarily caters to custodial account holders, many of its clients manage their companies’ accounts and investments via online banking applications. Anything that adversely impacts the availability of the bank’s website, hindering access to accounts or the ability to rapidly execute transactions, would be detrimental to the customer experience and reputation of the business.

IT faced the considerable challenge of achieving service assurance for more 150 customer-facing applications. This challenge was compounded by the fact that these investment banking application services were supported by multiple data centers. Disruptions to supporting services included DNS look-up delays, Active Directory or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) configuration issues, and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) delays.

NETSCOUT Solution

Already a long-time partner, the institutional investment bank turned to NETSCOUT® for service assurance of their Internet of Things (IoT) innovations and network reliability. A combination of the nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform and InfiniStreamNG appliances were chosen to proactively collect, organize and analyze wire traffic to provide rich information about the performance of web-based services. In addition to these best-of-breed solutions, nGenius Packet Flow Switches were deployed to feed network traffic to the InfiniStream® appliances, giving IT the ability to continuously monitor the applications to ensure availability and performance.

NETSCOUT Solution in Action

NETSCOUT’s cost-effective solution was deployed across the bank’s multiple data centers, enabling IT to take full advantage of the patented Adaptive Service IntelligenceTM (ASI) technology. ASI capabilities are based within NETSCOUT service monitors and real-time dashboards, which allow IT to streamline the troubleshooting process and provide support across hundreds of applications simultaneously.

By dramatically reducing systems administration and ensuring always-on performance, the NETSCOUT solution empowered IT to continue their network-based focus and expand end-user applications. During the deployment, a Remote Site Engineer (RSE) provided expert support to help the investment bank realize a rapid time to value with the new deployment. They were able to leverage newly defined dashboards and workflows, as well as, specialized service monitors for Web Services, HTTP, DNS, LDAP, and DHCP to identify and resolve customer-impacting problems rapidly. Further, the new implementation provides valuable monitoring and analysis capabilities to assure quality unified communications & collaboration (UC&C) services across the global offices and for customer engagements.

Business Value

The NETSCOUT solution has proven to be the ideal answer for addressing this institutional investment bank’s network and application performance needs as it embraces technology evolution for customer facing services. The IT team is now able to effectively monitor and proactively diagnose issues within its online web-services for clients. IT has gained the ability to see the full path of these services, including the enabling services such as DNS, HTTP, and Active directory, reducing the Mean-time-to-Repair (MTTR), in order to quickly resolve problems.

As a result of NETSCOUT, the bank can ensure online investment applications are always-on and available, providing the highest quality client experience and protecting the organization’s stellar customer-focused reputation.