The banking industry provides a variety of important services to their customers. Maintaining savings accounts, providing loans, paying bills—these services have a sizeable impact on the clients’ quality of life.
There are many banks to choose from. And these customers are going to gravitate toward banks that have the best quality of services, highest security standards, and continued efforts to improve on these factors.
Customers are becoming increasingly reliant on mobile technology. In fact, the online banking market is projected to reach $20.5 billion by 2026.
This alteration in customer habits rewards banks that can keep up with these technological demands. And the best way to do this is with reliable, secure, and repeatable development processes.
Salesforce DevSecOps combines the efforts of various teams—development, security, and operations—with the goal of streamlining the process and creating stronger products.
Various tools are available to integrate with your Salesforce environment that specifically benefit the banking industry. Automation is integral to many of these tools which frees up your team members to focus on more important matters.
But how does DevSecOps specifically target challenges within the banking industry? What benefits can banks expect from utilizing DevSecOps within their Salesforce environments?
Here are 7 reasons banks should implement DevSecOps practices to their Salesforce development pipeline:
1. Quality Assurance
As we mentioned earlier, banking customers have a wide variety of choices of where to do their banking. This means a bank that isn’t able to provide a quality experience is going to lose customers.
The market will always reward higher quality, but the importance of banking services takes this to another level.
DevSecOps tools such as Continuous Integration utilize multiple levels of quality assurance tests to verify the functionality of each development project. Other tools such as static code analysis check the quality of each line of code in real time, as it’s being written, instead of attempting to weed through the entire project after it’s completed.
These tools result in stronger projects and maintain a high level of quality that can be repeated with every development project.
2. Reduction of Issues in Live Services
High quality code results in well-functioning products. And when it comes to working with people’s finances, errors in functionality simply aren’t an option.
Banks used to be able to post their service hours on the door and lock them when closing time came around. This is no longer an option.
Mobile and online services have made banking a 24/7 service. Any delay in accessibility impacts customer experience.
Banks can’t afford to find and fix software bugs after the development project is released. These bugs can cause a harmful disruption. The quality assurance steps involved in a successful Salesforce DevSecOps pipeline greatly reduce the chances of service-impacting bugs still existing when the release is deployed.
3. Aids Regulatory Compliance
The financial industry is highly regulated due to the sensitive information it deals with. Personal information such as social security numbers, home addresses, and other personally identifiable information (PII) require intentional practices to properly protect.
Industry regulations such as PSD2, CCPA, Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, and the GDPR stipulate how PII needs to be handled.
DevSecOps integrates data security considerations throughout every step of the development process. This creates products that are more secure, more reliable, and compliant with government regulations.
Banks need to focus on security for a variety of reasons. Compliance with government regulations can save a bank from paying hefty fines. But more importantly, proper data security measures protect the customers that have trusted you with their more sensitive information.
4. Cost Savings
Every business needs to focus on minimizing costs and growing income—banks are no different. The essential services they provide don’t negate the fact that they are also businesses that need to be profitable.
Every development project begins with the goal of improving services that will provide a profitable return. A convoluted development process will not succeed in this goal.
The tools, checks, and affordances of a salesforce DevSecOps system will help developers get the project right the first time around. This reduces the need for them to go back and redo their work, which saves money in the long run.
Redundant tasks are a drain on overall productivity. Customer churn is also reduced when they don’t experience issues with fault product deployments.
5. Competitive Edge
Simply matching your competitors is not enough to position your bank as a leader in the financial industry—you need to introduce innovations. And a streamlined Salesforce development pipeline is the best way to accomplish this.
Continuous Delivery is another DevSecOps tool that increases release velocity, so you can quickly get your updates in front of your customers.
A faster release cycle allows banks to address contemporary issues. Those who aren’t moving forward are being left behind. DevSecOps aims to maintain security levels while quickening the pace at which you can produce new capabilities, tools, and offerings.
6. Confident Deployments
We’ve discussed the benefits of continued quality checks throughout the development pipeline. These benefits will be seen in your overall profitability as well as in increased customer satisfaction.
Quickly releasing software updates doesn’t guarantee they will be successful. DevSecOps includes a series of checkpoints so you can meet customer demands with confidence.
This confidence might not provide measurable returns such as increased revenue, but it will show itself through factors such as customer retention. Banking clients need to be able to rely on their financial institution.
High-quality releases will give the bank itself peace of mind, while also assuaging any worries on behalf of the customer by establishing trust.
7. Accuracy is Essential
Many of these benefits relate to how salesforce DevSecOps can help banks operate a successful business and provide useful services to their customers. And these benefits are incredibly important, but they’re not the only reason to institute DevSecOps practices in your Salesforce development pipeline.
Proper functionality of banking applications must be accurate because of the drastic impact they have on the customers’ lives.
Banking customers place a lot of trust in their financial institutions. And this trust is not to be taken likely. Banks have a duty to protect their customers’ information and help them navigate the occasionally difficult world of personal and professional finances. DevSecOps tools help make this process easier, more secure, and more reliable.
