Riyad Bank gives customers better digital banking experiences with Dynatrace

Riyad Bank embarked on a major business transformation, with the aim of enhancing the digital banking experience for its customers. To support this drive, the organization built a private cloud environment using Red Hat OpenShift. This created the agility Riyad Bank needed, whilst complying with stringent local banking legislation that prohibits the use of public cloud services. Now, it is working to enhance its cloud infrastructure, transform applications, and modernize legacy technology to create a modern, open banking platform.

As part of this, Riyad Bank is migrating applications to a microservices and container-based architecture, to maximize the value of its private cloud environment. As a result, the bank will be able to innovate faster, create new digital banking solutions, and build a stronger competitive advantage in the market. However, the transition to a cloud-native environment has also introduced significant new complexity, which makes it more difficult to deliver seamless digital banking experiences.

Riyad Bank needed to maintain end-to-end observability into its applications, so its teams could identify the root cause of problems and resolve them quickly, to provide the best possible experiences for its customers. It therefore needed a single monitoring solution that was compatible with both its private cloud infrastructure, as well as the range of other technologies within its environment. After evaluating the potential options, Riyad Bank identified Dynatrace as the best solution for its requirements.

“We wanted more detail about the performance of the apps in our private cloud so we could create better services and experiences for our customers,” says Jamil Barakat, Executive Vice President, Business Technology Service Operations at Riyad Bank. “Dynatrace was the best fit as a single solution that could provide end-to-end observability across our diverse technology stack. Other monitoring solutions were not as compatible with our private cloud and didn’t offer the same level of insight into the performance of microservices and containers, so it was an easy decision to implement Dynatrace.”

• Better banking experiences – Dynatrace’s AI capabilities instantly notify the relevant teams at Riyad Bank if there is a problem with one of its services, so they can investigate and resolve it before customers are impacted. The bank uses Dynatrace’s synthetic monitoring capabilities to identify the root cause of any issues relating to external parties, such as local internet providers and content delivery networks. These insights significantly reduce the time teams need to spend troubleshooting, so they can prioritize tasks that improve service delivery for customers.
• A single source of truth – With Dynatrace, Riyad Bank has a single observability solution across its entire environment, providing all the insights it needs from one dashboard. The bank’s testing team, applications team, and infrastructure team all share this same single source of truth, improving collaboration and enabling them to deliver greater business value.
• More confident launches – Dynatrace helps Riyad Bank to ensure new digital banking services work as well as expected when they go live in production, as it can monitor their performance in testing environments before the new version of an application is deployed. The bank can also conduct stress testing to ensure applications will continue to perform under different patterns of traffic and identify where optimization may be required to maintain seamless experiences.
• Precise insight to drive better services – Riyad Bank plans to extend its use of Dynatrace’s digital experience management capabilities to real user monitoring (RUM) in the future. This will help business teams understand how customers interact with the bank’s applications and how functionality could be improved to create a better customer experience.

“Dynatrace has become an essential solution at Riyad Bank, due to the mission-critical nature of the applications and services running on our private cloud platform,” Barakat says. “Dynatrace simplifies the complexity of our cloud-native environment, so we can monitor and understand the performance of our services from end to end. In a single view, we can see the status of all of our applications and services – which enables us to focus on what matters most to our business, giving us a significant advantage.”