Financial Services

Embracing disruption and a startup mindset

The financial services sector has been transformed over the past decade through the opportunities brought by new, digital workflows. The sector, once characterized as being conservative and slow moving, is now embracing disruptors and startup culture.

Digital touchpoints have made it easier for consumers to compare, buy, or switch accounts. Loan applications can be done in minutes, from a smartphone, and approved in seconds. Tracking devices, willingly adopted by the public, have brought new clarity to the insurance market.

This Cisco customer is one of the world's leading providers of financial services for the automotive sector. Historically, these services would mean arranging loans for car buying; today, the business also provides car subscriptions, digital parking services, fuel cards, and more.

It is a highly competitive, dynamic market. At any one time, and in markets around the world, the business competes with traditional banks, credit card companies, and niche service providers. The automotive industry is also exploring how driverless cars, battery-as-a-service, and fractional ownership may impact future revenues and service innovation.

However, in an uncertain world, some things remain unchanged: the financial services sector continues to be highly regulated; data security is paramount.

"The amount of data we handle is growing each day," says the company's data center network architect. "Data is the new oil. Our challenge is how best to manage that data. Some data is more sensitive, or more urgent, than others."

Reimagining the data center

An opportunity to reevaluate how the company managed this wealth of data was presented by European industry regulators. The regulators determined the customer's two data centers to be too close together and at risk of both being disrupted by a single, local event. Relocating one to a more distant location would strengthen disaster recovery.

The adoption of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) promised to simplify the migration of workloads to the new, secondary site. By using a secure, open, and comprehensive software-defined networking (SDN) solution, the customer could then optimize and accelerate future infrastructure deployments, with governance across application deployment lifecycle. SDN would enable rolling automation, creating ongoing efficiency.

This implementation was not intended as a "Big Bang" switch to ACI. With workloads too critical to fail, the customer phased in an application-centric approach, continuing to be network-centric when required.

"The goal was to simplify our operations, but switching to an application-centric approach provoked some serious discussion," says the customer spokesperson. "Today, I can say it was the right decision. Cisco ACI has been mind-changing for our network engineers, a totally different approach for us, but it has delivered that speed and flexibility."

Streamlined operations and greater consistency

The switch to Cisco ACI underpins a new level of operational efficiency for the customer. With everything now standardized via APIs, operations are more streamlined. Crucially for a business in the financial services industry, there is better visibility and consistency across operations in both data centers and all applications. This strengthens compliance with the latest regulations.

"If we have a request for a new server, we can deploy the ports with a Python script and it's immediately configured," the spokesperson explains.

This has a profound effect on the way the business moves on new opportunities. Customer-facing digital services can be developed with the assurance that the network team is ready.

"The networking guys used to have a reputation for being slow, for holding things up. But no more. With configuration, there is very little manual effort; action is a click or an item on a drop-down menu. We're now held in high esteem because we can meet the needs of the business quickly."

Data is segmented with the appropriate security settings, critical for a business that operates across multiple countries and involves millions of customers. "The rules are defined in the firewall. The network separates everything," says the spokesperson.

The business recognizes that simplification is a journey, not a destination. It is looking at Cisco Nexus Dashboard to enhance visibility across all cloud and data center networks. "We want to reduce the time we spend investigating issues. We're hoping Nexus Dashboard will allow us to see problems before they impact the customer," he adds

"For us, it's important to have as many solutions as possible with one partner. Cisco's platform approach, with open APIs and integrations, enables us to address our entire infrastructure."