Leading Financial Assures Remote Banking Operations for Customers

 Customer Profile 

This industry-leading international financial company offers retail banking solutions to millions of customers, including personal, small business, and commercial banking products. 

The bank maintains semi-autonomous business operations across the globe. With this organizational structure, in-country business hubs are responsible for local financial services delivery in their regional markets, including operating a network of traditional retail banking branches and automated teller machines (ATMs). Their Call Center operation is similarly organized into regional delivery facilities, with some larger retail bank branches also incorporating local personnel to complement the customer service agents working at these telebanking support centers. 

The bank maintains a significant information technology (IT) commitment to support business delivery to its clients and support its agents and has for years used NETSCOUT solutions to assist those efforts. 

The Challenge 

The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic required this bank to close numerous regional branches, prompting leadership to alternatively position 24/7 customer account access through mobile and online applications, as well as telebanking. 

While customers were using these account access options, many banking employees were now moving their offices to their at-home locations. With increased use of remote business operations, the company’s IT team needed to prioritize the performance of the virtual private network (VPN) and Citrix Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) now critical to successful day-to-day financial service delivery. With millions of global clients now reliant on uninterrupted remote account access, it was critical that remote banking operations work seamlessly. 

Days after this remote transition began unfolding, IT leadership contacted their NETSCOUT business representatives with concerns about visibility into performance of their Citrix Virtual Applications and Desktops. Citrix was a now-critical environment. The bank’s IT leadership had configured Citrix application traffic to be balanced across several company data centers to help assure performance. However, the local IT team could not visualize Citrix application traffic relevant to their business operations, leaving them unable to monitor this virtual environment or end-user experience. 

Beyond Citrix operations, the local IT team had broader concerns about the performance of their entire virtual environment, including VPN and SQL servers. They knew they needed to extend their existing visibility to differentiate and troubleshoot whether a Citrix VDI, VPN, SQL, or another service dependency was causing widespread or localized service issues for their remote user population. 

Solution in Action 

The IT team gained the visibility they required to manage remote service delivery and improve user experience by updating their NETSCOUT environment to include: 

• State-of-the-art nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform, with performance analytics required for real-time monitoring of their entire service delivery environment, including the VPN and VDI services critical to current-day operations. 
• Software-based InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) appliances installed at two regional data centers, with these added smart data sources using patented Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI) to generate real-time metadata from the company’s network traffic for nGeniusONE performance analytics.
• NETSCOUT Packet Flow Operating System™ software for Certified PFS 5010 appliances, with this packet broker solution installed at the two regional data centers to improve network traffic load balancing and overall network performance by forwarding packet traffic to the ISNG appliances as well as other tools in the environment. 

In addressing the IT team’s most immediate need, their local NETSCOUT business representative quickly configured real-time nGeniusONE Service Dashboard views that showed the Citrix VDI performance issue related to an instance of misdirected Citrix traffic. Using standard nGeniusONE workflows to contextually transition from the Service Dashboard views to increasingly granular Service Monitor and Citrix VDI metrics analysis, nGeniusONE provided the evidence required to both modify the Citrix service configuration to direct traffic to the proper destination, then assure these changes had been processed satisfactorily to improve local IT visibility into their remote users’ virtual desktop experience. 

nGeniusONE also accommodated IT leadership’s requirement for a broader Virtual Network view, with a single-pane Service Dashboard view that provided real-time monitoring and reporting on the collective performance of the VPN, virtual desktop, SQL server, and other service dependencies comprising their users’ remote application environment. This enabled both IT leadership and network operations to focus on critical areas based on changes in traffic utilization and patterns of use during the COVID-19 crisis. 

The Results 

This bank had a lot invested in assuring financial operations throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, and relying on NETSCOUT business resources and the nGeniusONE platform during this period enabled them to recognize several unique benefits: 

• For the leadership team – which had also committed to other charitable initiatives to help local citizens in need – they were able to reinforce to customers that transitioning to a remote operations model would not adversely impact their ability to do everyday business (e.g., processing payments, loans, and commercial transactions) during the pandemic. 
• For the local IT team, relying on their already-deployed nGeniusONE solution to troubleshoot emerging performance issues for at-home workers improved their credibility with their users, as well as across the bank’s broader IT leadership. As the bank continues to move forward with other strategic technology initiatives, this IT team is positioned to lead the deployment of new solutions that will be modeled for broader adoption across the business. 
• For the employees and Call Center agents now working out of their homes, they have assurance their VPN and Citrix virtual apps will operate as designed, enabling them to continue to support high-quality financial service delivery to their customers, without technology delays. 

For local customers able to access funds and process their financial transactions, they are better equipped to support their family households during these trying times.