Maajid Khan
Sales Director, Financial & Professional Services UK & Ireland
Financial and professional services organisations are operating in a market environment characterised by economic uncertainty, increased competition and the effects of heavy regulatory burdens and disruptive new technologies. They’re under pressure to protect revenue, increase profitability and scale operations, which puts a new focus on the network’s role in enabling business outcomes. What are the challenges these sectors are facing, and how can Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) support growth, innovation and agility for these organisations?
Both financial and professional services organisations have faced significant disruption in recent years.
In the banking space, nimble new fintechs are providing the seamless, personalised, app-based experiences that consumers increasingly expect, piling competitive pressure on traditional institutions. The democratisation of trading also means that advisers and brokers are seeing profits diminish, as people turn to trading apps instead of intermediaries.
Similarly, professional services organisations are exploring how cloudification and the provision of app-based services can help them streamline operations and offer more attractive propositions to clients, in a bid to remain competitive and improve the bottom line.
At the same time, sustainability is rising up the agenda as regulatory and consumer pressures grow on businesses to improve their ESG performance.
Cybersecurity is a growing and evolving challenge
The financial sector is a particularly attractive target for cybercriminals. It has been the victim of more than $12 billion in losses. The number of attacks is rising, and so is the potential for lost business and penalties: Equifax, the US credit reporting agency, suffered a significant data breach in 2017 and paid more than $1 billion in penalties as a result.
These risks aren’t exclusive to the financial sector, however, and many organisations aren’t prepared for the possible fallout: almost half (46%) of professional services firms across the UK are not equipped to handle a potential cybersecurity attack.
AI offers productivity, insight and customer experience opportunities
For professional services, harnessing AI and data analytics is a key priority. AI can offer value by analysing large structured and unstructured data sets and uncovering valuable insights for clients, automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks and generating draft documents like contracts and reports.
In the financial services sector, too, AI is playing an increasingly important role, though data security remains a concern. Customer chatbots, automating knowledge management and fraud detection are just a few of the ways it’s currently being used, and many more new applications are anticipated over the coming years.
This requires robust and scalable network connectivity, as the rising quantity of AI-related traffic places heavy demands on organisational infrastructure. Aside from bandwidth, AI has different characteristics to other types of network traffic, such as very low tolerance for latency and the tendency to feature sporadic, intense bursts of traffic.
The importance of aligning the network with business outcomes
A resilient, highly available network that can flexibly support business goals – such as expansion into new markets and the launch of new apps and services – is a critical success factor for financial and professional services organisations.
In the financial sector, low-latency network connectivity between applications, exchanges, locations and users is essential to support the life cycle of a trade end-to-end, from price discovery through to execution, reconciliation and clearing. A bank trading on the foreign exchange market, for example, needs immensely fast response times when checking currency prices in London, New York and Hong Kong, as latency affects the performance of the trade.
Many professional services organisations are expanding into emerging markets such as the Middle East, Latin America and East Europe. However, 62% of professional services firms believe their technology is holding back their organisation’s potential for growth, so there is significant room for improvement here.
Network-as-a-Service provides a more agile service model
The development of Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) is significant in tackling these challenges. NaaS takes the cloud model that most organisations are familiar with and extends it to the network, allowing organisations to rent network services on demand.
Unlike traditional telco models, which may take months to provision, NaaS connections can be delivered immediately where capacity is available. Bandwidth can also be dynamically scaled up and down at short notice according to the needs of the business.
NaaS offers self-service capabilities, allowing businesses to build and manage bespoke global networks end-to-end through a digital platform.
Colt On Demand: global connectivity with fast, flexible provisioning
Colt On Demand provides agile connectivity wherever and whenever financial and professional services organisations need it. Our multiple-award-winning self-ordering platform provides flexible and secure connections between data centres, enterprise locations, major cloud providers and the public internet.
Services are ordered and configured through an intuitive portal or via API. Where capacity is available, new services can be provisioned in minutes, and bandwidth can be upgraded or temporarily boosted in near-real time to meet sudden peaks in demand.
Colt On Demand offers incomparable reach in Europe, APAC and the US to:
- 1,100+ data centres
- 130,000+ hybrid on-net buildings
- Several million enterprise buildings served by partners across 180+ countries, but with one SLA, one contract and one point of contact for all network services
- More 80 global financial markets through our transatlantic market data distribution services
Besides our market-leading network capabilities, we take pride in the partnerships we’ve fostered with other industry leaders including Microsoft, IBM, AWS, and many others; that help us deliver an extraordinary service for our customers.
Brian Meaney, Global Chief Architect of Internet & Mass Infrastructure at Cisco, has this to say about our partnership:
“We're proud of our long-standing partnership with Colt because the company keeps pushing the boundaries of innovation. Colt offers industry-leading visibility and analytics capabilities which not only meet but exceed businesses' regulatory compliance and sustainability requirements. The fully programmable, secure, and resilient Colt On Demand service shows that the company is an innovator in NaaS and AI networking.”
NaaS provides a balance of responsiveness, control and security
As the needs of financial and professional services organisations change, NaaS allows the network to evolve swiftly in response. Bandwidth can be flexed even on an hourly basis, and connections to new locations and resources can be up and running in minutes, as opposed to the four or five weeks that are typical lead times for traditional network services.
That means whenever an organisation makes an investment – in a new site, say, or a new cloud service, or when a new app or service is developed – it can be connected and generating income almost immediately. As network traffic grows, NaaS also allows organisations to continue harnessing new technologies like AI without the network becoming a bottleneck.
NaaS offers more than just flexibility, however. It also provides the visibility and control to manage the routes that data takes between two points, which is important in meeting increasingly onerous regulation and compliance requirements.
With NaaS, the service provider manages the entire network. This means that hardware, software and security patches are kept up to date and potential vulnerabilities are minimised. Also, with a single provider for networking and security solutions like firewalls and DDoS mitigation, the two can be more tightly integrated.
As a shared infrastructure with software-driven functions, NaaS is much more efficient in its power usage compared to traditional telecoms models. It also avoids the carbon emissions of installing and provisioning reserved ‘just in case’ bandwidth that may never be consumed.
NaaS changes the focus from keeping up to keeping ahead
NaaS allows the network to respond quickly and nimbly to changing and often unforeseeable demands from the business, without the lead times or inflexible contracts of traditional network models. For financial and professional services, this alignment between network and business outcomes makes a critical contribution towards outpacing the competition in a challenging and unpredictable marketplace.
