Considering that 61% of consumers use digital banking services at least once a week, a good digital banking platform is essential to the success of your business. As consumers rely more on digital for banking needs, it is critical for your online and mobile solutions to give them the access they need, when and where they need it.
Over the past few years, several well publicized outages have highlighted the issue of system reliability. In particular, one credit union had an outage in 2022 that lasted more than one week, forcing users to go to branches to perform basic banking functions. The impact on member retention and brand reputation was likely significant as the story reached mainstream press and social media.
To avoid this public relations nightmare, performance characteristics must be evaluated alongside features and functionality when evaluating digital banking solutions. Solutions hosted in the public cloud through providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) typically offer significantly higher availability than those maintained in a vendor’s private data center environment — but it’s also critical to understand how the provider has architected the solution within a public cloud environment. Solutions should operate in multiple availability zones, and multiple data centers within each zone, for example, to ensure that if servers go down, they are automatically relaunched quickly.
Consider the following additional performance characteristics when evaluating your digital banking provider:
- Uptime percentage: Ask potential providers about their uptime record and whether they will contractually commit to an uptime percentage. While 99.9% uptime may seem satisfactory at first glance, this amounts to nearly 9 hours of downtime a year, versus only 26 minutes annually for systems with 99.995% uptime.
- Number of outages: Take a look at how many different outages occur annually. In addition to understanding uptime guarantees, you should also examine whether outages are a recurring issue.
- Response time: When an outage occurs, find out how quickly your provider can restore the system.
- Data loss: Backup systems are also important. You want to make sure your platform contains redundancy and backup capabilities so you don’t experience data loss after an outage.
Bottom line, operational performance should be a key consideration when evaluating whether a platform meets your needs. As more consumers and businesses rely on digital platforms, you must ensure that your platform is reliable and available when your users need it.
To learn more about how performance characteristics impact the strength of your digital banking platform, read our white paper, Beyond Features and Functionality: Five Critical Questions to Ask When Evaluating Digital Banking Solutions.