SMOAD Networks

5G SD-WAN
January 5, 2022

Secure & Resilient connectivity for financial institutions

Digitalization in financial institutions is a welcome relief for all. Generation Z will be the first to embrace digitalization; dropping cash and cards in favor of e-wallet and contactless payment. The recent pandemic has prompted across generation lines to opt for contactless payment. Financial institutions are forced to rethink their banking strategies as they look for new ways to innovate, enhance security and scalability. For this, it is essential to embrace a practical approach by dismissing legacy IT and reshaping connectivity infrastructure.

The banking services are not restricted to in-branch service alone, ATMs, insurance, automated teller machine, interactive teller machines have all transformed the landscape of connectivity systems in the banking industry. The challenge arises with rural customer force, shrouded with unreliable connectivity and poor bandwidth. Forget about legacy infrastructures like MPLS VPN or VSAT as they are expensive and unscalable.

The answer is to build a resilient IT solution for banks. The data held by the banks are silos and hence accessibility with speed and security becomes an issue. The use of cloud computing or edge computing has proven to be successful and yields desired results. Seamless connectivity between internet service providers and the cloud can help in ingesting data with speed. Using a hybrid approach can ensure continuous connectivity.

Financial institutions are moving to mobile app and distributed sites to improve the network capabilities of their customers. This gives the customer more choice to choose a platform they are comfortable with banking. These new platforms give rise to new network requirements to scale your banking operations to reach remote customers.

SD-WAN in banking networks
Financial institutions are striving to improve customer experience by expanding their reach with more customers and kiosks. SD-WAN deployments can provide a secure VPN connection across destinations by offering expansive bandwidth for cloud tools and services. At times SD-WAN routers can become a reason for single-point failure and for this, a 4G LTE could be an alternative during disruptions. SMOAD Networks offer significant bandwidth for rural areas with redundant connectivity from 4G LTEs instead of VSAT technologies.

Downtime can come down heavily on financial institutions and in order to curtail this, redundancy and resilience is the key. Duplicating the network elements can ensure that even if one fails the other can ensure business continuity during disruption. SMOAD edge optimizes and aggregates diverse bandwidths to improve network traffic transport. This intelligent failover feature helps to switch between networks keeping the complete ecosystem from branches, IoT devices, ATMs and software stacks resilient during an outage.

Hub and Spoke model for financial institutions
Hub and Spoke is a branch delivery model, where certain functions of the spoke branch are eliminated to allow them to enjoy smaller footprints. A full-service branch is supplemented by smaller and automated locations. In most cases spoke locations use kiosks and ATMs for resolving the customer’s banking needs. Hub is defined as a one-stop branch where all products and services are available. Hub supports the spokes with either specialization in advice or service. The ideal location for spokes is where there is high footfall like a shopping mall, café or trade fair centers or recreational branches. The role of spokes is only advisory. With Hub and Spoke model, you can cut down the operating expenses of your branches.

The financial institutions invest in devices for better interactivity to educate customers on the products. Customers are looking for an omnipresent and interactive banking experience expecting an integrated real-time experience. This type of deployment architecture comes with AES256 and SHA512 authentication, securely via L2 network with the automatic key exchange at regular time intervals.

SMOAD Edge and banking services
SMOAD Edge optimizes data security and handles massive daily bank operations with increased innovation. With SMOAD there is no room for disconnection. Through SMOAD edge you can bring data and storage closer by saving processing time and increasing bandwidth. Accessing data from remote locations and far off data centers can be done in a flash with Edge. End-user experience is customized to in-store or in banking services. Features like facial recognition and virtual tellers can transform user experience that was not possible with traditional connectivity due to latency and speed problems.

Financial institutions can take a big leap into the rural setup with state of the art SMOAD connectivity solutions.