Full-stack observability and advanced AIOps dramatically reduce manual effort and enable teams to deliver seamless customer experiences faster and more efficiently. Suresh Viswanathan, COO, TSB Bank, discusses how one of the UK’s leading banks is supporting its customers with Dynatrace to deliver first-class user experiences and to continue innovating.
Software intelligence company, Dynatrace, has partnered with TSB Bank to accelerate innovation as the bank expands digital services for its customers. TSB built a modern multi-cloud banking platform on AWS, IBM Cloud and BT Cloud, to support customers across all key channels, including mobile, where more than 70% of them prefer to transact. With AI-powered answers and intelligent automation delivered by Dynatrace, the bank’s digital teams can now optimise both front and back-end applications. This has enabled them to deliver top-notch user experiences, resolve problems before customers are ever impacted and free up valuable time for innovation.
“Accelerating our Digital Transformation is the top priority for us and Dynatrace is the killer app to help us achieve this,” said Suresh Viswanathan, COO, TSB Bank. “To keep pace with our customers’ needs and how the market is evolving, we must ensure our digital services are best-in-class, always accessible and easy to use. Dynatrace’s extensive observability and AIOps capabilities have been critical to our success. With Dynatrace, previously manual-intensive tasks are now managed automatically, freeing our teams to focus on what matters most – driving innovation for our customers and accelerating our Digital Transformation strategy.”
TSB’s customers rely on dozens of digital services to execute a single transaction, which can be as simple as a bank deposit or transfer. By providing deep observability into each step of the digital journey, Dynatrace delivers real-time insight into performance, availability and potential issues in the user interface, to help the bank’s teams prioritise their focus on service enhancements that will have the biggest impact on customer experience.
“Dynatrace helps us to understand areas in the digital journey where improvements will deliver the greatest outcomes for our business and our customers,” said Viswanathan. “The platform has saved our teams from having to manually search for these insights, so they can instead focus on improving our digital connection with our customers.”
Here, Suresh Viswanathan, COO, TSB Bank, tells us more about how the bank is accelerating innovation and improving the digital banking experience with Dynatrace.
Can you tell us about your role and some of your key responsibilities as COO of TSB Bank?
I have a wide range of responsibilities which include delivering stability across our services, but also looking after digital IT change and running the operational aspects of how we support customers, procurement and so on.
How do you take a strategic approach to ensuring TSB Bank’s IT targets are being met?
There’s a very clear vision of how we are trying to help our customers. If you break down what customers do with us into a story of two parts, they do a lot of transactional stuff – what we call customers servicing themselves or being helped by our colleagues. This includes payment requests and balance checks. The second part is to try and fulfil their goals, such as buying their dream home or dream car. And these are what you would traditionally call sales, fulfilment, or propositional elements. So we’ve got a very clear vision statement of how we’d like to measure progress on both of these fronts. And we’ve set metrics for ourselves as a company that we track the whole company to. So, the IT strategy and what we’re trying to get done therefore conforms to what we’re trying to do to help customers.
How is the bank accelerating innovation and improving the digital banking experience with Dynatrace?
There are a couple of flavours to it. One is what’s happening in our environment – what’s working well and what’s not working well. And over time, we’re using the native Artificial Intelligence within Dynatrace to help us segregate what I call noise with what I call signals. So the signal to noise ratio is what you’re trying to improve all the time, meaning you want to focus on the real issues, not on the noise. Therefore, the AI platform within Dynatrace is a big help for us in that space.
The second thing is that for a bank like us which is very focused on ensuring we are available both physically and digitally for our customers, on the digital front, customers really don’t care whether it’s the Wi-Fi not working or 4G not working, as far as they’re concerned, they just care about their TSB app journey. Therefore, what we’ve tried to use is the Dynatrace SDK to track from the point that a customer does something on the handset all the way back to the handset. And we use the Dynatrace SDK to help us calibrate performance or defect – sometimes a customer might be so unique that we’re not able to fulfil effectively for that customer while we’re doing it well for everyone else. And so that instrumentation on the device helps us to help our customers.
Can you tell us more about how the Dynatrace platform has enabled you to deliver top-notch user experiences for your customers?
Dynatrace has been very helpful in quickly identifying service issues and pinpointing the location to help us fix fast. Secondly, the Dynatrace instrumentation allows us to focus on performance – to fix performance issues as and when they occur so that the customer service is improved. Sometimes it could just be for a second, a minute, five minutes. Sometimes it could be a low-grade issue that we use the Dynatrace tool to boost service and fix going forward.
As one of the UK’s leading banks, what are some of your key priorities when it comes to Digital Transformation and how do you ensure you operate with these in mind?
For customers, the first thing when you have a digital waterfront is that you’re always available. That’s the minimum requirement. I think trust is very highly correlated with stability and availability these days. And if you look past that and assume that most of us are operating at a pretty similar level, then the second thing is how many problems are you able to help with. We look at that very systematically and take a very data-driven approach to question what customers do with us – what matters most to them and therefore how do we put that on the app or on the web front so that they can progressively consume us at their convenience, rather than just when we’re open.
What does the future hold for TSB Bank?
A couple of things. One is we’ve invested in a really good technology marketing stack, so that we can be there for customers in a timely fashion subject to them wanting help from us. So, for example, if you’re looking for a mortgage, if you’re looking to put your house up for sale, how do we get to know so that we can be relevant to you at that particular time? The second area we’re looking at is can we be more useful to customers beyond traditional areas of banking, so if you take out a mortgage with us, even if we don’t manufacture home insurance, is it not sensible to offer you a curated home insurance experience? Because it’s likely that if you’re going to buy a home, you need home insurance to go with it. And how many more things can we offer to our customers at that point in time to make their lives easier and to give them back time and also to monetise that at the other end for TSB while we’re helping our customers.
With a non-legacy, modern system we are always looking for ways to innovate and deliver money confidence for our customer base both through FinTech partnerships and by partnering with the best tech providers – such as IBM and Adobe – to deliver an optimal digital experience.
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