The Importance of Reliability and Resilience, Srirang Srikantha, CEO, Yethi Consulting

By Robin Amlot

Your reputation, your good name, is on the line all the time. Now more than ever, your bank could be just one bad transaction away from loss of business and loss of value.

Customer patience is thin. There may be nothing wrong with the transactions on your API. But from a customer’s view, your API is too slow! In seconds, you have already chipped away at your customer’s loyalty. IBS Intelligence spoke with Srirang Srikantha, CEO of quality assurance specialist for application reliability and performance, Yethi Consulting, beginning by asking him whether he believes banks take the issues of reliability and resilience seriously enough.

“In pockets, yes. As an industry, there is an enormous amount of emphasis on system uptime, on platforms, and availability, which are essentially performance-related issues. Today, a new generation of customers for a bank decides where to put his or her money based on how cool the app looks rather than how good the balance sheet is. So, is your app available? Is it good to look at those things which matter? The balance sheet and the reliability of the business come a little later.

“There are institutions that still believe that the ownership of the data that goes in, the ownership of processing the data, lies with the software vendor and doesn’t lie with the bank, which is consuming the software. I was in the US for a few months, and most of the community banks, most of the smaller banks, pay very little importance to QA (quality assurance). They say: ‘I trust the vendor.’ Relying on the vendor to have done his job properly is, in my opinion, a very risky way for a bank to operate.”

Do you think the pace of digital transformation is creating problems?

“It is not creating problems. I think it is bringing a lot of existing problems to light faster. Banking customers who might have checked their statement once a month are now able to check at a transaction level. If transactions don’t post or if some computation is wrong, this gets highlighted faster.

“Digital transformation exposes a new way for banking customers to interact with banks, which is more real-time and more transparent. Therefore, if there are problems, they get picked up and they get highlighted much faster.

“The new medium had its own challenges 15 years ago. If you had to get a transfer done, you would go stand in a bank, and you would wait for 20 minutes, and that’s the way it was. You wouldn’t do that today. If you open an app today, most of the time you want the app to be absolutely responsive. It has to open up within, let’s say, two seconds. And if it asks you to wait for seven seconds, you believe there is a glitch. And this is the problem of the new medium.

“Are banks able to cater to the issues being thrown up? Correcting this later is very expensive. We had a customer who chose a certain system architecture, which put the CRM at the heart of everything that they did. They never did performance validation on the architecture. Within 12 months, their response time on the mobile app dropped from about 1.5 seconds to about 8 seconds. Which essentially meant that people no longer trusted that the app was going to deliver. And they stopped using the app, and the load shifted back to the branches.”

How do banks minimise risk with a testing program?

“When you bring in a professional independent team of testers, the task is not to prove that there are problems! The task is to prove that everything works, a different connotation. If you have to prove everything works, along the way, you may find problems which you will fix.

“That requires tenacity, that requires an attention to detail. You have to take every piece of the puzzle and say, Yes, I feel that things are working. And this could come in terms of whether functionality is working, whether the performance is good enough, whether the security is tight, all three.

“We bring a lot of learning and experiences from around the world, and we’re trying to constantly improve the craft. We’re constantly trying to improve what it takes and the kind of outcomes that we are able to give to our customers. The world is changing significantly, in terms of how QA is performed and how QA is delivered.”

What are the benefits of full-stack observability?

“Essentially, the amount of technology components running a bank today is high, and this complexity is increasing on a daily, weekly basis. Innovation comes in, platforms get more specialised, new integrations are built in, and therefore the number of pieces of technology which are required to run a bank successfully is growing and has been growing for the last 20 years. With anything that gets complex, the number of things which could break down also increases.

“What we have to do is to figure out what’s failing or what’s failed or what is going to fail. This could be on your application stack, it could be on your operating system, it could be on a database, it could be at a lower network level, any of these. Observability is a fancy way of saying I can look at all of this, bring it into a single pane of glass, and give you something which is much more intuitive to understand where there are failures and put them in context of, is this something related to the consumer banking business? Is this something related to customer onboarding? Is it something related to payments? And which part of that stack is failing?”

How can we leverage AI and machine learning to drive business growth and efficiency?

“There is a lot of talk globally about how AI is going to make testing redundant, and AI is writing code. AI is really good at a lot of things. We are using AI in different parts of our service delivery to customers. About 25-30% of our audit design is now done through AI. There is a lot of talk about AI independently navigating systems and undertaking transactions, and figuring out what’s working, what’s not working.

“The technology is promising, but the reality is it’s not going to be completely autonomous. It’s going to have human beings because we bring in a degree of knowledge, a degree of understanding of what’s happening. In terms of putting things into context, we do a much better job of understanding systems and understanding underlying data.”

What does Yethi itself offer?

“We are one of the largest independent teams working on behalf of banks globally. So, we bring in a ton of experience! You get full service in terms of the ability to look at any platform within a bank and put it through its paces, allowing you to hold your OEM vendors accountable. Yethi comes in and we make sure that all of the systems work so that when you take that piece of technology into production and roll it out to your banking customers, you know that it’s going to work flawlessly.

“We can do that for almost any piece of technology within a bank, starting from your customer onboarding process to your loan origination process, trade, treasury, etc. We have worked with some 140 banks in 35 countries, across retail, consumer, and corporate banking. Our domain expertise covers over 300 distinct banking applications. That’s the service capability, the experience, that is part one. Part two is that we are investing in building tools for the future, including AI-enabled tools, and we are building out that capability. Some very large names have bought the platform, and they are seeing significant benefits in terms of daily activities, which otherwise would consume human effort. These tasks have now been moved to bots that we’ve supplied.”