Banking on digital transformation

The SteelCentral implementation is part of a project within Raiffeisen Switzerland to build a digital workplace environment with a mobile workforce strategy that leads to improved customer advisory services and increased efficiencies. Raiffeisen Group is the third largest bank in Switzerland, has 1.9 million cooperative members, 3.8 million clients and 880 locations throughout Switzerland. It has 196 billion Swiss francs in assets under management and 188 billion Swiss francs in loans to clients.

Raiffeisen has approximately 11,000 employees across Switzerland working from laptops, desktop and mobile devices, all connected via VPN. The employees need to complete a range of standard banking functions while mobile – from mortgage approvals to credit checks to customer engagement and support – with fast page load times and no interruptions from system updates or lack of connectivity. As such, employees must be given access to all the applications they need, from any device, at any time.

During a routine IT upgrade, the bank found it had to monitor the end-user experience of its employees manually, which was inefficient and time-consuming. Wanting a more proactive system in place which identifies problems before the employees even realized there was a problem, Raiffeisen selected Riverbed’s SteelCentral Aternity. This employee and end-user experience monitoring solution transforms every Raiffeisen device into a self-monitoring platform with an integrated view of the multiple streams of data, providing a comprehensive portrait of the real employee experience. Unlike other APM products that monitor specific applications from the perspective of the data center, or device monitoring products that measure device, operating system, and app health, SteelCentral Aternity automatically monitors and correlates together the three streams of data that constitute true user experience for every app in the portfolio: user interactions; device health and performance; and application performance.

“SteelCentral Aternity has enabled us to deliver against all our success criteria to deliver a strong employee mobile experience,” said Stefan Somogyi, System Specialist Expert, Raiffeisen Switzerland. “Performance, the monitoring of applications and digital services, fast page load times… it has excelled in every use-case.”

According to Somogyi, there is less downtime for employees and devices, additionally, applications are quicker, and it’s enabled the team to stay one step ahead of any performance issues. “There are a couple of areas where we’ve seen real benefit to the bank and our employees,” he explained.

Where other monitoring technologies only extrapolate, emulate, or estimate what the end-user sees, Somogyi says SteelCentral Aternity allows him to understand how employees experience and interact with their applications, digital services, devices, and the network. “Using Aternity, we can see issues in real-time. We’re then able to drill down, solve the problem, and show people what the root cause was. We can then be absolutely clear with our advice.” He says this has had a positive, knock-on effect. Somogyi and the team as a whole are seen as faster, more effective and more authoritative in their advice. “We’re now faster to fix and quicker to send reports which has resulted in better collaboration with our users.”