Over the past decade, two significant shifts have occurred in businesses developing and launching digital technologies. The first change relates to the consumerisation of IT. In previous studies, Gartner stated that consumerisation represented one of the major trends likely to impact the IT industry in the coming years. After the demise of the dot.com era, IT budgets declined, and companies began focusing on larger consumer IT markets. This shift altered how technology entered the marketplace, including the finance industry. 

Rather than innovation entering businesses and passing on customers, the customer market would adopt new tech before enterprises. The second significant change has been the rise of digital talent in the workforce and the demand that the corporate technology experience matches the customer-based requirements. People are less reluctant to differentiate between corporate and personal technology or depend on challenging enterprise tools when consumer software is more flexible and effective. The rise of remote working has accelerated this shift, with workers looking to take more ownership of where and how they work.

Rising customer and employee expectations

All of these changes have accelerated the expectations of results from technology for both customers and employees. In society today, customers have very little tolerance for waiting or potential disruption. Customers expect transactions and related processes to be as simple and seamless as possible and are likely deterred by a service if this isn’t the case. With higher expectations for customer experience, flexibility and rapid deployment of new services are a significant part of a leading business.

The finance industry has been impacted by the rise of fintech companies which dedicate themselves to data and are free of legacy systems and the barrier attached to established banks. Utilising modern services and products related to cloud-native technologies, fintech companies have scaled without the high IT infrastructure and development costs often linked with traditional software development. 

The consistent performance of a cloud-native environment can only happen if the data on which everything is dependent is adequately protected. Any data breaches can result in massive disruption to service. For example, a ransomware attack on Travelex disrupted the business for months, resulting in customers having no access to foreign currency and eventually drove the company into administration. In the move to integrate cloud-native technologies and modern software, practical considerations about resilience and data protection often are pushed aside. For the finance industry, with many regulations and policies, disregarding data protection should not happen. Inadequate data can spell disaster for the digital transformation plans for many fintechs. According to the Veeam Data Protection Trends Report 2022, about 90% of IT leaders within finance confessed to a protection gap between how much data they could lose after an outage and how often their data is stored.

With applications and data spread across physical, virtual and cloud environments, and given the sensitive nature of the financial information stored by fintech companies, infrastructure vulnerabilities and data breaches must be removed. The way IT supports our modern world has changed significantly. New cloud-native applications and microservices are reducing software development timeframes, enabling more innovation and focusing on meeting shifting customer demands. Implementing a data protection solution capable of working across these different environments is essential. With this, fintechs can ensure they can reactivate applications and protect their business and customers against cyber attacks.