Banks and financial institutions are more technology-reliant than ever before as they seek to be more customer-centric in their offerings. As such, the branch plays a major role in their quest for customer service excellence, giving customers a place to conduct transactions, receive personalized attention from bank reps and take advantage of next-generation technologies such as video how-to’s or chatbots to further enhance their banking experience.
Some banks have taken customer-centricity one step further, opening their branches to act as neighborhood community centers or gathering places for organizations. Some bank branches make their videoconferencing systems available for customers to use, while others host a lounge area with free refreshments and free Wi-Fi—all in the name of making customers happy.
The increase in traffic due to customer-centric applications and services—not to mention video and Wi-Fi use—can put a real burden on the branch’s network, however. Insufficient bandwidth for cloud, internet and media access can negatively impact applications and services, leading to user and customer dissatisfaction. And branches won’t be able to implement new digital services without fear of slowing their network to a crawl—or, worse, crashing the network.
Add to the mix the complexity of maintaining compliance and security of sensitive data, and these days managing the network is more difficult than ever. But for many banks, upgrades to the network are not an option due to cost and time constraints, yet most don’t have a full-time IT person onsite to deal with outages or network problems.
The answer to this networking conundrum may be in SD-WAN technology, which works with the existing network to provide application-level intelligent routing and network management. With SD-WAN, banks can not only manage today’s complex and bandwidth-intensive services over the network, but do so intelligently and more efficiently, without having to replace their existing networking hardware. SD-WAN also enables service and device consolidation through secure segmentation, which enables collapsing of multiple siloed networks into one to reduce the branch footprint.
SD-WAN centralizes provisioning and management of the network, ensuring all locations are compliant with government regulations and up-to-date on the latest application versions and security policies without having a full-time IT person at each location. Using SD-WAN, banks can get new branches up and running in days, not the weeks or months spent waiting for MPLS service through the telco, and then for on-site configuration, service configuration and staffing.
SD-WAN can detect the fastest or most optimal path (or paths) for network traffic in real-time and dynamically reroute packet flows for the best performance to ensure continual uptime for any networking application, be it data, voice or video. And policies can be put in place to ensure mission-critical applications have priority on the network.
Versa Networks’ Secure SD-WAN solution can help take the pain out of managing multiple banking locations. Versa delivers industry-leading Secure SD-WAN technology to help companies control the cost, increase the reliability and improve the security of their networks.
Technology is truly at the heart of any customer-centric endeavor. Ensuring the network can handle the bandwidth needs of applications to deliver a high-quality experience for customers at all locations is a must for financial services firms. SD-WAN can help ensure an optimal network experience, which—hopefully—means customers will keep coming back.
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