Best Practices of Application Maintenance and Support for Financial Institutions

1. Best Practices of Application Maintenance and Support for Financial Institutions Technology is today the steering wheel of every competitive business environment. Lack of a proactive action to detect an unexpected downtime can cost your business heftily. This understanding suggests that application maintenance and support (AMS) is paramountly necessary. Should Application Maintenance Take Place Regularly or Occasionally? The general perception is that maintenance should take place when an enterprise needs to do bug-fixing. But what bank executives fail to know is that support improves software performance. It enhances its agility and adapts it to the changing environment. Therefore, it is essential to implement maintenance throughout. The top-most best practice is to outsource the maintenance service to an application maintenance and support provider. Before further ado, let’s understand the meaning of AMS. Application maintenance is the corrective, preventive, adaptive and perfective software support. It includes troubleshooting, maintenance, modifying and enhancing legacy systems. To perfect the exercise, the maintenance personnel requires to carryout research, analysis, programming, design, testing and documenting. Therefore, maintenance is to be made available 24/7. This is to ensure there is a top-notch quality with minimum bugs. In a business setup, several applications may be in use. Some require continuous improvement while others need regular updates. These tasks suggest a need for expertise skills. Hiring an in-house employee may require a vast budget commitment. The best option may be to have an application support and maintenance partner. Any bank should consider it very essential to hire professional maintenance for uninterrupted functionality. A financial institution will benefit in the following ways from professional support and maintenance: ● Total elimination of technical issues, which is necessary for the smooth functioning ● Availability of easy to use (easy-to-use) and flexible methodology ● Enhancement of applications with new features ● Quick spotting of problems and remedial actions are taken ● Continuous updates

2. Top Maintenance Practices to Make Banks Functionality Stay on Top 1. Staying Ahead of Regulations, Policies and Practices Banks are institutions known to be highly regulated and the rationale for regulations is to address the concerns of their safety and stability. Keeping abreast with the regulations, procedures, and policies help to ensure that applications are in line with the latest requirements. 2. Staying on Top of Customers Requirements This helps to know when clients’ needs are changing to make adjustments and have new processes and functionalities. It means software then needs an improvement. Ignoring the changing needs of customers can sideline an enterprise from the competition. Every other business is on high alert of this phenomenon and is willing to comply. Businesses are taking initiatives to understand the customer more. And, the availability of various tools of the internet is allowing them to do just that. It is a matter of deploying the analytical tools to garner the best analytics. It is about having the ability to analyze the current market state from a comprehensive and overarching approach. 3. Adapting Applications to New Reality Today’s technology is evolving fast. New technologies are on the rise every time. This means businesses have to be alert as well as receptive. Every change or update of the Operating System and supporting platform requires application update. There are also other internal and external changes. Banks can sometimes experience a change in organizational structure and should as well get ready for pressures from market dynamics and economic conditions. Software Support is the Ultimate Aid The above three practices indicate that application maintenance and support services are highly essential. Any interference to the fulfillment of these exercises must be met with full force. There is no compromise of seeking expert knowledge and skills from software support firms. Banks should expect to be on the receiving end of hacking and abuse due to their nature of the business. Their applications are highly vulnerable, and applications support is therefore necessary. Such unscrupulous exercises can interfere with customer experience which is paramount. In this regard, applications must live up to clients’ expectations. The need for flexibility and convenience also calls for extensive support. Users should know that AMS service is part of the software development lifecycle. Though it may look complicated to an

3. average person, software support firms make is straightforward. They implement software maintenance from a process point of view rather than one-time performance. Software support helps to save on cost. You may overspend on your initial application only to realize not all features were useful. Using software support helps to consider only those features useful to your consumers. Software support houses are well-acquainted with the concept of end-user development approach to software development. Therefore, banks should seek app maintenance and support as an ever-present and crucial business process. The key issue is to invest in the right support and maintenance services firm. It is the sure way to avoid applications crushing on non-compatible platforms, risk loss of data and consequently loss of customers.