Digital Experience Monitoring: An Asset for Financial Institutions
Digital Experience Monitoring: An Asset for Financial Institutions
The Financial Services and Insurance (FSI) industry requires absolute reliability, security, and a seamless customer experience. As finance becomes increasingly digital, online and mobile channels now carry the bulk of customer interactions. This makes Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) a strategic asset for any financial services provider that wants to protect revenue, reduce risk, and build long-term customer trust.
Overview
The Financial Services and Insurance (FSI) industry requires absolute reliability, security, and a seamless customer experience. As finance becomes increasingly digital, online and mobile channels now carry the bulk of customer interactions. This makes Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) a strategic asset for any financial services provider that wants to protect revenue, reduce risk, and build long-term customer trust.
Flow AI (LLM)
Flow AI is a conversational AI assistant that lets teams build and refine user journeys from a simple prompt. It accelerates scenario design (steps, assertions, variations) and helps standardize journeys across teams — without confusing it with incident management.
Incident Guard (Incident Prevention)
Incident Guard focuses on detecting and preventing disruptions by correlating signals, reducing noise, and accelerating root cause understanding — to protect service continuity.
Challenges in Financial Services and Insurance (FSI)
FSI institutions face a complex matrix of challenges where technology, regulation, and customer expectations intersect. In modern finance, every second of delay and every error in the digital journey can impact revenue and reputation.
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Evolving customer expectations: clients demand instant availability, speed, and ease-of-use across all channels — mobile, web, and APIs — while still using strong authentication and advanced security features.
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Regulatory scrutiny and compliance: strict regulations governing data protection (like DSP2 security) and service reliability require non-negotiable data control, auditability, and compliance across all digital financial services.
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Financial risk: system outages or poor performance translate directly into significant financial losses, higher operational costs, and potential regulatory penalties for banks and insurers.
These pressures have forced FSI institutions to adopt technology not as a secondary support function, but as the core delivery mechanism for their services. As a result, monitoring the digital experience has become essential for managing operational, financial, and reputational risk in the financial services industry.
How Monitoring with Ekara Helps the Financial Sector
The digital experience in financial services is measured through two complementary monitoring methods that together form a complete Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) strategy.
Synthetic Transaction Monitoring (STM)
Synthetic Transaction Monitoring uses automated robots 24/7 to simulate critical user journeys — logging in, making a transfer, simulating a loan, authenticating with MFA, and more. It provides a proactive view of how key finance journeys behave, even outside of business hours.
Real User Monitoring (RUM)
Real User Monitoring (RUM) captures the actual experience and performance perceived by real end-users on their devices. It shows how customers truly experience mobile apps, web banking portals, and insurance services in production.
By unifying STM and RUM, DEM translates raw performance data into actionable insights focused on the end-to-end user journey. This unified approach to monitoring the end-user experience goes beyond traditional technical monitoring tools and helps finance and IT teams manage the level of digital service that customers expect from modern financial technology.
Read about why measuring the user experience is crucial for banks.
Security and Compliance by Design
With Ekara, you don’t just monitor end-user performance; you proactively safeguard every interaction across your digital financial services ecosystem.
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Built-in security monitoring: Ekara continuously simulates critical user transactions and entire journeys, including MFA authentication, to detect vulnerabilities and performance issues before they become incidents.
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Regulatory confidence: demonstrate compliance with DSP2, DORA, and other regulations through automated, auditable monitoring that documents how your financial services perform over time.
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Data sovereignty: Ekara offers deployment options that align with data residency and sovereignty requirements specific to finance and other regulated sectors.
Read how Ekara gives financial institutions a strategic edge for regulatory compliance.
How Banks and Financial Institutions Optimize IT Spending and Customer Service
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Optimizing Monitoring Costs at a Financial Institution
Reduce TCO and regain an independent view of service quality
A European financial institution was facing a high total cost of ownership (TCO) because their monitoring services were entirely dependent on outsourced vendors. They lacked an independent view of the service quality provided by their digital partners.
Solution: the institution called on Ekara SaaS to monitor the performance of over 100 applications and critical business paths, including credit and transfers.
Outcomes: the monitoring campaign led to a 25% reduction in TCO by providing leverage in vendor negotiations and allowing teams to focus on core banking functions rather than on internal monitoring complexities.
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Improving the Reliability of a Bank’s Mobile App
Identify latency and reduce transaction failures
A leading retail bank called on ip-label to monitor its critical mobile payment application. The app was experiencing intermittent transaction failures, which led to lost revenue and customer frustration.
Solution: Ekara was deployed to provide a real-time, end-to-end view of the app's performance. It immediately identified consistent latency in API calls with a third-party payment processor, which was the direct cause of the failed transactions.
Outcomes: by addressing the API issue, the bank reduced transaction failures by 40%, saving substantial revenue and helping to retain critical customer trust in its mobile financial services.
How Insurers Boost Productivity and Efficiency
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Greater Efficiency for an Insurance Claims Portal
Find bottlenecks during peak usage
An insurance provider was struggling to maintain a high-quality user experience on its self-service digital claims portal, particularly during times of high volume. These issues were negatively impacting policyholder satisfaction.
Solution: the provider adopted Ekara to track real-time user experiences across the claims process. The monitoring campaign revealed clear bottlenecks during peak hours, when policyholders struggled to upload necessary documents.
Outcomes: following data-driven adjustments based on Ekara's insights, the overall claims submission success rate improved by 30%, with a measurable increase in customer satisfaction scores.
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Gains in Insurance Agent and Broker Productivity
Ensure speed and availability for external networks
A major global insurer needed to guarantee the speed and availability of digital tools used by their external network of agents and brokers — tools that are critical for daily sales and policy management. Slow performance directly translated into lost business opportunities.
Solution: the insurer implemented Ekara to track the performance of all critical back-office and customer-facing applications (CRMs, portals) from the perspective of their professional users.
Outcomes: by ensuring agents had a consistently reliable and fast digital experience, the insurer guaranteed business continuity. Ekara’s proactive end-to-end view enables rapid resolution of application performance issues, ensuring that the sales network remains productive and customer service is seamless.
Mini-glossary
- DEM
- Digital Experience Monitoring — combines STM and RUM to measure the end-user experience of financial services.
- STM
- Synthetic Transaction Monitoring — robots continuously simulate key finance journeys such as login, transfer, and loan simulation.
- RUM
- Real User Monitoring — measures the actual experience of real users on banking and insurance applications.
- FSI
- Financial Services and Insurance — the regulated sector including banks, payment providers, and insurers.