Monitoring Open Banking API Performance and Cloud Monitoring
for a Leading European Bank
About the customer
The customer was a leading bank based out of Ireland, bringing a rich history of excellence in the BFSI sector. Established in the 18th century, the bank has a sizeable legacy infrastructure that has scaled alongside state of the art technology. The customer wanted to leverage next-gen mobile connectivity to cement its market positioning in the digital era. The bank’s application landscape was utilizing the PSD2 Open Banking architecture which is the standard for European institutions. However, our customer was looking to integrate third-party applications and data sources, giving its end users greater flexibility. As a result, the bank could anticipate the potential risks to data privacy, as well as performance challenges.
Executive Summary
The bank was struggling to meet the degree of performance which would set it apart from its competitors in the digital era. However, an Open Banking system meant poor visibility and a lack of control over systems performance. SmartCirqls’ solution enabled better monitoring and control over the banking system with real-time performance monitoring of the Open Banking APIs. The solution was hosted on the AWS cloud, ensuring the highest possible level of network and data security. Aided by SmartCirqls’ Open Banking API monitoring solution, the bank was able to send automated daily, weekly, monthly reports as per CMA regulatory requirements, as well as gain operational insights for a better end-user experience.
Here's what we did
- Secured data-at-rest, data-in-motion, and data stores
- Automated CMA report generation and scheduling of all KPI and KRI reports
- Enabled single-pane-of-glass monitoring of the AWS environment
- Designed automated backup & restoration for the bank’s data and app configurations
The Solution
SmartCirqls leveraged the power of high-performance API analytics to deliver customized compliance and operations monitoring for the bank.
After a careful assessment of the as-is landscape, SmartCirqls recognized the criticality of maintaining stringent data security as well as regulatory adherence. The solution defined measures for data-at-rest and data-in-motion, using signed certificates for communication and securing data stores. Additional security use cases were also recommended, and alerts implemented for AWS and other application logs. SmartCirqls’ cloud-migration solution helped to auto-deploy the monitoring platform, transferring all previous configurations to the AWS environment with ease.
API logs were monitored and advanced analytics used to track performance of various KPIs and KRIs for the bank. This allowed daily, weekly, and monthly basis CMA reports to be automated and scheduled, streamlining the EU regulatory and compliance needs of the bank. Finally, a robust backup mechanism was deployed that would enable the automated restoration of apps and data. This would prevent any downtime in case of application failure, increasing business productivity for the bank.
Challenges
- High-security measures needed for Open Banking APIs
- Data privacy needed to be maintained, securing sensitive information
- Maintaining API response within milliseconds, delivering high performance
- Monitoring massive volumes of transactions per second
- Foolproof High-Availability as even short downtimes would cause loss of business
Benefits
- Better evaluation of the open banking system, improving performance for end-users
- Optimized application landscape for third party support
- High-performance customer experience, improving profitability
- Automated CMA regulatory compliance requirements
- Increased transaction capability allowing the bank to scale further
To know how SmartCirqls can help your organization optimize processes through the power of Big Data Analytics, contact us at [email protected].
Data Sources
- AWS logs: VPC flow, Cloudtrail, Cloudwatch, S3 access
- Application access logs: Ping federate logs
- Application logs