WHITE PAPER

DevOps: A Catalyst for

Digital Transformation
of the Banking
Industry
Abstract
To sustain protably in a rapidly changing
environment characterized by evolving customer
demands, agile competitors, and stringent
regulations, banks need to develop products fast,
launch them faster. However, a complete overhaul
of core systems to instill agility is impractical due
to cost implications and impact on business-as-
usual. What is required is an approach that can
substantially reduce the development cycle time,
which is traditionally quite long, some 12-18
months easily. This paper discusses how nancial
services rms can employ DevOps practices to
cut the development-deployment cycle time for
new offerings and feature upgrades. It also
outlines the associated challenges and ways to
avoid the pitfalls in the transition to a DevOps
model.
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Agility: The Key to Digitalization

In the digital era, quickly rolling out products and services and
releasing innovative upgrades have become crucial to success.
The success of disruptive digital companies such as Netix,
Uber, and Flickr can be attributed to their phenomenally low
lead times and the ability to swiftly incorporate user feedback
to improve the product. Given this, it is only obvious that
organizations taking weeks and months to launch products and
services are at a huge disadvantage.
As part of their efforts to move to a digital model, banks and
nancial services rms are opting for API-cation of services to
speed up the development and launch of differentiated,
customer-centric digital offerings. But traditional banks lack the
agility needed to match the pace of FinTech players in quickly
delivering digital offerings to market. This can be largely
attributed to the inadequacy of backend IT systems,
particularly the conventional software development processes,
where development and operations are isolated activities with
their own timelines, and minimal collaboration and automation.
This hinders quick product releases, and here’s where DevOps
comes in.
DevOps practices combined with the right technologies,
strategies, and tools help infuse agility into software
development, which in turn drives rapid delivery of digital
offerings. By speeding up software delivery through a faster
software development life cycle (SDLC), DevOps thus acts as a
catalyst for digitalization for nancial services rms.

The Rocky Road to DevOps

The business case for adopting DevOps practices is clear.
However, moving to a DevOps style of working comes with its
own set of challenges, and organizations will need to effectively
address them to realize the benets.

Development teams and operations teams often have

conicting objectives – the former is focused on quick releases
while the latter is tasked with maintaining a stable and
responsive system at all times. This mismatch often results in
conicts about how the ultimate goal of end user satisfaction
must be achieved. Also, the two teams may be using different
tools and methodologies which might require unication.
Moreover, organizations may face employee resistance − a
reluctance to switch from familiar, legacy tools; adopt activities
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aimed at infusing a culture of collaboration; learn new skills;

and accept the role changes that DevOps will entail.
Another key challenge revolves around legacy infrastructure –
traditional banks typically operate with legacy systems that
hamper effective automation of processes. By ignoring
production realities and increasing time and effort spends,
manual processes are in complete variance with DevOps'
objective of faster SDLC.

Getting DevOps Right

Buy-in from top management is crucial to effective DevOps;
without the support of the C-suite, DevOps projects often fail
halfway. CIOs must assume the responsibility for inculcating
the DevOps culture and institutionalizing the right
methodologies. In addition, some key aspects that must be
kept in mind while transitioning to a DevOps model are:
Culture
Organizations must overcome the perception that ‘dev’ and
‘ops’ teams function on either side of an insurmountable wall.
Breaking down the ‘invisible wall’ will require a cultural shift
wherein both these teams should be willing to embrace
behavioral change and empathize with each other.
Involving development teams in deployment and maintenance
will instill a deeper understanding of the bottlenecks that the
operations team has to overcome. Similarly, when operations
teams share the responsibility for business goals, they
understand the operational features needed to achieve those
goals. Empathy between the teams enables the operations
teams to appreciate the challenges in releasing code quickly
and frequently while allowing the development teams to
acknowledge the issues created by insecure or fat or slow code.
Empathy promotes a culture of collaboration resulting in the
delivery of the best combination of functionality and operability.
Maturity assessment
Organizations must assess their existing delivery capability,
identify the gaps, and determine the capabilities required to
support quicker deployment. An evaluation of the IT ecosystem
against DevOps principles is key to establishing the maturity
levels, dening a strategy to reach the target state, and
drawing up an implementation roadmap with precise
milestones for each maturity level. Maturity assessment should
be a continuous process with accreditation in line with other
well-established process maturity models.
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Methodology
Organizations must adopt a clearly dened execution
methodology that includes rapid feedback cycles, effective
monitoring, and reporting mechanisms. Individual
organizations must dene their own execution methodology
based on current maturity levels and the desired state. A
blended DevOps approach necessitates a review of established
Agile processes such as backlog management and the way user
stories are written.
Automation
The DevOps approach advocates end-to-end automation right
from planning, development, integration, quality assurance,
environment and conguration management, infrastructure
provisioning, deployment, monitoring, and feedback.
Organizations must conduct due diligence to determine if the
tools' functionalities match organizations' specic technology
stack and environment. Investing in popular or highly ranked
tools that do not meet organization-specic requirements or
include functionalities that are not immediately needed would
be a waste of money, time, and resources.
Measurement and monitoring
Sustaining a DevOps environment will entail continuous
measurement and monitoring across the delivery pipeline
followed by improvement initiatives. Even with the best tools
and execution methodology in place, achieving time-to-market
and quality can pose challenges. Continuous measurement
across the SDLC against established metrics, and obtaining and
incorporating feedback, is essential to ensure smooth delivery.

Use Cases from the Financial Services

Industry
Some banks have moved to DevOps environments and
signicantly improved business outcomes - typically in the form
of agility in delivery. Here are a couple of examples:
A large global bank tied up with an airline to issue white label
cards; such implementations typically took 12 to 15 months to
roll out. By implementing an API strategy built with DevOps
practices, the time-to-market was reduced to just six months.
Moreover, the bank has cut down the total SDLC time by 47%.
New APIs and capabilities are launched in mere 12 days
against six to nine months earlier while the mobile versions are
released every nine days.
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Single-minded focus on development, which is a hallmark of

Agile methodology, results in a product that works well in the
development environment but fails in the production
environment. To address this, a large North American bank has
created product-aligned, cross functional teams, and redened
the role of the product owner and the Scrum master to include
and manage operational aspects. Non-functional requirements
such as scalability, monitoring, and deployment now form a
part of product backlogs and sprint planning. With this, the
bank hopes to reduce time-to-market for new offerings and
introduce faster feature upgrades to existing products.

Conclusion
Digital transformation is a must to successfully compete with
agile, digital-rst players. With IT as a strategic driver of
digitalization, revamping software development and delivery is
vital. The DevOps approach offers a way to transform the
SDLC. A carefully thought out DevOps strategy can help
nancial institutions to quickly launch digital offerings, and
provide the much needed push for digital transformation.
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About The Authors

Guruvayurappan Ramabhadran

Guruvayurappan Ramabhadran is a
Solutions Architect with TCS' Banking
and Financial Services (BFS)
business unit. He has over 11 years
of experience in the digital banking
space, and has worked on
technology transformation programs,
productization of banking functions,
and integration of systems for
leading banks across North America
and the Asia Pacific. Guru has been
instrumental in architecting solutions
for multiple lines of businesses
across banking. He has a Bachelor's
degree in Mechanical Engineering
from Anna University, Chennai,
India.

Saravanan Lakshmanan

Saravanan Lakshmanan is a
Solutions Architect with TCS' Banking
and Financial Services (BFS)
business unit. He has over 17 years
of experience in managing key
strategic programs for leading banks,
and in the architecture, design and
development of IT solutions for
various transformation programs.
Lakshmanan has been involved in
implementing mobile banking
platforms for different lines of
business for a leading bank in North
America. He has a Bachelor's degree
in Electrical and Electronics
Engineering from Manonmaniam Contact
Sundaranar University, Tirunelveli,
India.
Visit the Banking & Financial Services page on www.tcs.com

Email: [email protected]

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