The Imperative of Digital Banking Security
As digital banking becomes increasingly prevalent, the need for stringent security measures has never been more critical. The FBI’s warning in June 2020 about the potential surge in financial cybercrimes underscores the urgency of this issue. Financial institutions and mobile banking providers must uphold rigorous security standards to protect against digital threats. This article guides you through the risks and preventative strategies essential for digital banking security.
The Pandemic’s Push Towards Digital Banking
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the shift towards digital and mobile banking, as global banking infrastructure adapted to remote operations and customer needs. Banks discovered the efficiency of remote workforces, while customers embraced the convenience of digital banking services. This transition has supported the economy by enabling seamless financial transactions, even amidst a global crisis. However, this digital shift has also opened the door to increased cyberattacks, making it crucial for banks and fintech developers to prioritize overcoming digital banking security issues.
Security Challenges in the Digital Banking Arena
Digital banking faces a myriad of security challenges, including:
Identity Theft: Identity theft remains a significant threat, with the Federal Trade Commission reporting 1.4 million identity theft complaints in 2020, a dramatic increase from previous years FTC, 2021.
Account Takeovers: Account takeover fraud has seen a substantial rise, with criminals altering account information to siphon funds undetected.
Credential Stuffing: Credential stuffing attacks exploit stolen login credentials, posing a growing threat as data breaches proliferate.
Automated Malware: Malicious software, often spread by bots, can infiltrate banking systems, leading to financial losses.
Cloud Breaches: Cloud services, while beneficial, can be vulnerable to breaches, as evidenced by the Cloud Hopper investigation WSJ, 2019.
Teleworking Risks: Remote work environments can introduce security vulnerabilities if not properly managed.
Phishing Attacks: Phishing remains a prevalent tactic, with attackers deceiving bank employees into compromising sensitive data.
Online Security Recommendations for Banks
To combat these challenges, banks must implement comprehensive security measures:
Multi-factor Authentication: Enhancing login security with additional authentication layers, such as OTPs or biometrics, can significantly reduce the risk of unauthorized access.
End-to-End Encryption: Protecting data with robust encryption standards, including SSL/TLS protocols and strong encryption algorithms, is essential for secure digital transactions.
Secure Code and Architecture: Encrypting app code and using obfuscation tools can prevent cloning and other cyber threats.
Real-time Alerts: Notifying customers of account activity through personalized alerts can help detect and prevent fraudulent transactions.
Customer Education: Informing customers about security risks and safe banking practices is vital for preventing attacks like phishing and spoofing.
Conclusion
The digital banking sector must remain vigilant and proactive in addressing security concerns. By adopting a holistic approach that includes advanced technology, employee training, and customer awareness, banks can create a secure digital banking environment that instills confidence and trust among users. As the digital banking landscape continues to evolve, so too must the strategies employed to protect it.
With the large-scale adoption of data analytics and visualization platform, stakeholders have started to understand how the importance of leveraging the data collected from the customers to understand their decision-making patterns.
Customer Intelligence is a huge part of data analytics that enables business owners to understand their customers’ decision-making process. Analyzing the data collected from the customers makes it easier for the stakeholders to make business decisions based on the insights extracted from the data. Customer Intelligence is thus a crucial factor that can lead to personalized Customer Experience (CX) and result in long-term customer retention and loyalty. Let us take a look at how businesses can make the best use of data visualization software to derive dynamic marketing and customer relationship strategies.
How to Successfully Leverage Customer Intelligence?
A. Unify the Data
To turn the data into meaningful insights, the organization must unify the data. This can be achieved by deploying any dynamic data analytics tool but first, the customer relationship managers must know how and which data from the consumers should be collected. Today, customers can interact with the business in multiple ways such as emails, web or mobile applications, text messages, or even phone calls. Documenting the findings from these interactions will make it easier for the analysts to make the best use of the data visualization platform and churn meaningful charts and data stories. Some of the data-sets that are vital for Customer Intelligence are:
User demographics
Customer preferences
Social media sentiments
Favorite transactions
Sales interactions
Mobile and website browsing actions
B. Monitor Customer Experience (CX)
For businesses, a seamless and memorable customer experience is a critical success factor that has a lasting impact on the business. Healthcare is one such domain where monitoring the customer experience in real-time brings forward insights that can be used by relevant stakeholders to provide personalized care. Healthcare business owners are constantly trying to find more penetrative use cases of data analytics for healthcare, with a keen focus on their patients. While Customer Intelligence guides the stakeholders by virtue of insights from historical data, monitoring real-time data is the key towards unlocking hospital care that prioritizes the patients.
C. Enhanced Customer Segmentation
A large part of Customer Intelligence is enabling the sales and marketing teams to design campaigns that effectively result in desired business outcomes. Analyzing the customers’ data involves segregating the millions of people into major categories based on their behavioral patterns and buying preferences. Customer segmentation based on product reviews, sales interactions, and response to offers, makes it easier for the stakeholders to discover new opportunities and design advertising campaigns with a focused targeting.
Business Impact of Leveraging Customer Intelligence
For many businesses the ultimate goal to consistently drive sales by ensuring the end-consumer continues to use their services and products over any of the other industry competitors. Investing in a dynamic data analytics and visualization platform to practice Customer Intelligence has a lasting impact on the business in multiple ways such as:
A. Identify Market Trends
A key part of gaining a competitive advantage is spotting trends before any of your industry peers. Customer Intelligence allows the stakeholders to analyze data sets to derive common patterns and predict future trends. Many data visualization tools are built to successfully forecast customer behavioral trends that enable the sales and marketing teams to build campaign recommendations based on meaningful insights.
B. Improve Brand Reputation
When businesses prioritize their customers’ choices, the result will most likely result in the customers trusting the brand. Today, businesses can address the customers’ concerns in real-time and by leveraging the historical data and real-time Customer Intelligence, the grievance management teams can provide a swift solution, thereby ensuring there is no damage done to the brand.
C. Customer Loyalty
Every action and interaction with the customer is an opportunity for the business to gain a deeper understanding of their consumers’ psyche. Once the behavioral data is analyzed and presented in the form of data stories using a robust data visualization platform, stakeholders can determine how their campaigns can offer a personalized experience, giving customers a feeling that the business cares about their choices and values their decision to spend money. The long-term effect of a well-defined Customer Intelligence strategy can be seen on building a customer base that is loyal to the business and thus it is a critical stepping stone towards gaining a competitive advantage!
As is our culture, at the end of the year, we publish a summary of some of the emerging software engineering trends. We draw on our knowledge, current news, and our customers’ requests and perspectives to make these assumptions. In case you’re wondering, by the way, here’s last year’s article in which we predicted a COVID-19 pandemic (just kidding, we were as surprised as you were.
Yes, although in many ways 2020 seems like a lost cause when it comes to digital transformation, software technology is more hectic than ever. That’s why it’s necessary to stay on top of the current trends happening in your industry, as it will allow you to make better decisions and stay ahead of the competition. So what does the post-pandemic world of software development hold in 2021
Know the latest trends in software development?
Virtual reality.
This time, virtual reality is at the forefront of the latest trends in software development. After all, Facebook’s launch of the Oculus Quest 2 could mark a turning point in VR adoption, as it not only frees the user from the desktop but also offers a high-end – and at €299, truly affordable – immersive experience. Tech-savvy entrepreneurs and software developers alike immediately jumped on the idea, and, as a result, new VR applications are created every day. They offer exciting engineering, healthcare, e-commerce, education, digital marketing, and other essential business areas.
Better still, with projects like WebXR, VR is becoming more accessible. The move to remote working has even created a movement advocating virtual offices with gamification elements. So who knows, ladies and gentlemen? With all these improvements in virtual reality, we may all soon be working from virtual offices in a collaborative VR environment. This entire article is written from the comfort of a virtual café.
Virtual workspaces as a potential trend for 2021.
Cloud trends in 2021
Multi-cloud infrastructure.
With the recent significant disruption of AWS, enterprises would do well to consider creating a multi-cloud environment for their companies. As the name implies, this is where enterprises combine their operations with multiple cloud providers to improve the resilience of their applications and services. In this way, they can maximize each platform’s benefits and mitigate the drawbacks, such as data loss or unplanned downtime. However, other advantages include not being tied to one vendor and achieving optimal performance.
Next year, Amazon will also launch Amazon ECS Anywhere, which includes on-premises data centers in addition to AWS-managed infrastructure.
Quarks
Quarks may be the latest in a series of open source development trends, but it is poised to grow Java’s very future. Created by Redhat, it is a full-stack structure for Java virtual machines that enables the development of so-called cloud-based, or “Kubernetes-enabled” applications (written in Java, Kotlin, or Scala). Besides improving boot time, runtime costs, and performance, Quarkus simplifies life for software developers by offering real-time restart feedback and providing unified configuration.
Spring Boot Loader.
Spring Boot will also continue to be an excellent choice for the Java platform in 2021. The framework makes it easy to build standalone Spring applications, providing a flexible solution for configuring transactions with databases, Java Beans, and XML and offering batch processing and robust REST endpoint management. Best of all, Spring Boot simplifies dependency management and automatically configures applications.
Micronaut
Another framework worth keeping an eye on is Micronaut, an upcoming JVM-based juggernaut, as it may be the most desirable technology to study in 2021. By default, the structure helps the most popular cloud features – including Eureka, Kubernetes, and Netflix Ribbon – externally
Codeless/low-code technology trends in 2021.
Who says you need developers to bring your product to market? As market leaders Google and Amazon have shown, the continued growth of low-code and no-code platforms makes software development more ubiquitous than ever. While, to some extent, low-code software still requires coding by people familiar with programming, it has become faster – and cheaper – than ever before.
On the other hand, Codeless software takes the concept of low-code to a whole new level and, depending on who you ask; the mayor will have a dramatic impact on the future of software development. But what seems will shift the program to non-programmers – or what some call ‘citizen developers.’
No-code and low-code platforms allow companies to serve customers worldwide without having to maintain their developers. In this way, companies can create websites from pre-built blocks, exchange data with CRM solutions, add online payments using Stripe, and even collect customer feedback using Google Forms or another provider. Entrepreneurs, in turn, can minimize time to market and evaluate their product or business concepts in record time.
More cross-platform frameworks
Multi-platform frameworks are becoming more common, and this couldn’t come at a better time. After all, they allow companies to reuse virtually all business logic and UI across mobile, desktop, and web platforms with little effort and in one fell swoop. A great example is the Uno platform, which enables existing .NET teams to create excellent cross-platform applications. Other alternatives include Xamarin, Log4j, and Bunyan.
Rival technologies: Rust vs. C++, Flutter vs. Electron
When it comes to developing system tools, Rust is likely to share the C/C++ market significantly. Simultaneously, Flutter and Dart will continue to improve their desktop support – and thus compete with Electron for this particular market segment.
ARM chip
Microsoft’s grand experiment with the Surface Pro X seems timely as more devices move to the ARM architecture, primarily due to more straightforward design, power efficiency, and application portability. Apple itself recently left Intel with their MacBook Pro’s new M1 chip touting “up to 2.8x processor performance, up to 5x graphics speed [and] up to 11x faster machine learning.” There will undoubtedly be growing pains, but the potential for future applications is enormous.
Deep Learning Technology Trends in 2021
Despite the conspicuous hype, there is much to be excited about in OpenAI’s new GPT-3 language model. Not only does it include arguably the largest and most sophisticated neural network currently available, but it can also generate anything with a language structure – from poetry to creative fiction to attempting to write computer code. It accomplishes the latter to the impressive level of a junior developer. However, recent reports have suggested that the technology is still far from the singularity it appears to be. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI himself, has admitted that it is only a “first taste” of the future. However, the Elon Musk-founded company has been the talk of the town since it released its API last June – so we’ll have to wait and see what comes of it.
Databases
Over the past year, the world has continued to witness the extraordinary expansion of data. With this remarkable growth, you usually had to invest in additional DBA services. But today, you can take the help of various AI consultants like EverSQL and Postgres.ai and save money by integrating these services into your company’s development process.
On the other hand, DB vendors such as Oracle are expanding their solutions with more modern autonomous databases. Suppose you’re not familiar with this term. In that case, it refers to a cloud database that – according to Oracle’s website – uses machine learning to “automate database tuning, security, backups, updates and other routine management tasks traditionally performed by DBAs.”
Moreover, unlike a conventional database, a standalone database can perform these tasks without any human intervention.
NET 5
This month, Microsoft released .NET 5, a significant update to the .NET platform designed to provide developers with a unified, cross-platform experience. The platform replaces .NET Core 3.1 and .NET Framework 4.8, making their various headache-inducing variants – i.e., .NET Standard, Mono, etc. – completely obsolete. – completely obsolete. Also, .NET 5 brings C# 9, the latest version of the platform’s programming language, with exciting new features. And although .NET MAUI, the long-awaited evolution of Xamarin. Unfortunately, forms have been delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic; life for .NET developers has already become much more comfortable
Lower app store fees and cloud infrastructure costs.
And finally, to complete the list of technology trends in 2021, the various platforms are becoming cheaper! Not only has Apple announced its App Store Small Business Program, which will lower App Store fees by 50% for all businesses earning $1 million or less per year, but the cost of cloud infrastructure should also come down. For this reason, it may be cheaper to use a cloud provider if you currently run your on-premise infrastructure. And who knows? If we’re lucky, we might even end up benefiting from some exciting new developments!
With the increasing trend and demand for online education caused by Covid-19, many startups and educational institutions are coming up with edTech solutions to obtain market share. However, not all of them earn their original investment back. The primary reason behind this being that some companies are not creating an edTech solution with great value. It is essential that an edTech solution provides meaningful educational material.
In this article, we’ll discuss the steps and considerations for creating an edTech solution. But first, let’s understand the current edTech market scenario.
According to a Market Brief by EdWeek, nearly 15% of schools in the USA will have a set of VR classroom kits by the end of 2021.
A recent report by Dealroom and London & Partners states that with $630 million investment in London-based edTech companies, London holds the top position for edTech investment in Europe.
Gadgets are becoming more sensible, with parents and teachers adopting new approaches to innovation in education technology. This headway in educational technology innovation has boosted the demand and interest in useful edTech mobile and web applications.
Things to know before you create your EdTech Solution What is EdTech?
EdTech or Education Technology is an area of technology that is focused mainly on providing software solutions for the education industry. The aim of this technology is to improve the accessibility of education and to emphasize the streamlining of the learning process.
EdTech companies focus on building solutions that provide the students with a futuristic and immersive learning experience. In 2021, the edTech industry will consist of various educational tools powered by several advanced technologies such as extended reality and IoT.
Impact of Covid-19 on EdTech
The Covid-19 outbreak has significantly disrupted the global economic scenario. Some sectors saw a negative impact, whereas others realized a massive increase in market capital and customer demand. However, the education technology industry was positively affected by the coronavirus pandemic, with a rise of 15% in the year 2020 alone.
The pandemic has made us realize the applicability of the technology in the education sector. EdTech experts believe that the increased accessibility of education has unveiled new learning opportunities for students worldwide. The increased availability has also democratized education for those students who can not afford hefty tuition fees to get a world-class education.
Coursera saw a rise in student enrollment with 10.3 million new registrations in the first thirty days of the Covid-19 pandemic. This is a 644% rise in comparison to the same period the previous year.
As the world has seen the goodness of implementing technology in the education process, they’ll continue to promote edTech, and we’ll see more and more students benefiting from edTech solutions.
“Learning can take place anytime, anywhere.”
Factors to consider before developing your EdTech Solution
However, building software tools and applications for teaching is a very troublesome job. There isn’t any straightforward approach with which you can define your edTech platform architecture. Therefore you should know the following factors that are related to edTech in 2021.
Schools cannot afford many EdTech tools
Due to the rise in edTech solutions demand, there is a cut-throat rivalry between edTech businesses. Hence, it is essential for you to be sure about the edTech solution benefits that you bring to the table. High-quality educational content is the heart of every edTech solution, but what makes a solution more worthwhile investing into, is how it delivers the content.
Suppose your edTech solution is focused on providing educational institutes with the ability to streamline their processes. In that case, you should make sure that your solution helps the institutions in a manner that they won’t then need to make significant investment in other technology solutions that solve related problems. In simpler terms, your edTech solution should provide unprecedented value for the institution’s money.
Data security should be your priority
With guidelines such as GDPR being in place, it has become essential for the technology companies to protect their user data. The data security concerns in the EdTech sector become even more severe when implementing technology at the institutional level. Hence, EdTech companies need to provide customers with very secure and robust EdTech solutions.
Educators are the worst students
It is evident that young minds are very adaptive to adjust and embrace the innovations and disruptions that they may encounter. Therefore the user experience isn’t as concerning for students. On the other hand, the educators are likely to have difficulty in adapting to changes and innovative user experiences. Most educators are used to conventional methods of teaching. They would prefer using blackboards, textbooks, and pencils over other methods. Hence, your edTech solution should be designed to deliver an easy to comprehend and easy to use user experience for educators in particular.
Bringing technology has been considered taboo in classrooms
Conventional teaching methods often don’t appreciate the use of smartphones or computing devices in the classroom. Students can misuse the devices to discover answers to tests, and most of the time, they don’t even consider it as cheating.
Bringing gadgets to the classrooms can result in an issue for the educators who won’t be able to access the student’s work impartially. Moreover, it is a precarious pattern that can result in calamitous ramifications in general. Students as a whole will trust each snippet of data found online as totally valid and reliable.
Have an In-house Educator in your team
EdTech solutions are all about educational material, and not many can help you understand the best methods to classify and streamline the content within your edTech solution. Having an academic instructor will help you design an edTech solution that benefits the educational community.
Steps to a Successful MVP
It is always advisable to develop an MVP for an edTech app before launching a full-fledged app. An MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is the preferable approach to software development for agile methodologies.
Identify the learner or student: There are several types of edTech apps that you can develop. Some are focused on the students, while others cater to the educators (teachers or institutes). Before you begin with the development, you should know the target user-base, and based on that, you will be able to design your app infrastructure and other elements.
Know the user’s requirements: Despite your years of classroom experience as a learner, you probably still can’t fully comprehend what most educators and students need. Thus, conducting research for your edTech solution is an unquestionable requirement for the development process. You can either take help from a research agency or conduct your own research, by asking your potential customers about the current issues and challenges that they face with conventional education systems. Also, you must create the customer personas, as this will help you with the UAT (User Acceptance Testing).
Create an MVP: Developing an MVP is the best way to test your app idea, which might look extraordinary on your psyche or on paper. However, you won’t really know how wonderful your concept is until it is made available to the public. The MVP will be a edTech app that solves the core problems that you propose to solve, however it may not be refined. The MVP is focused on testing the validity of your business assumptions, rather than producing an immaculate looking app. The MVP will help you understand if your app idea is in accordance with market research and customer needs. You’ll always find new learnings when creating an MVP. An MVP is the low-cost solution to ensure that you are spending on the right app idea.
What are the essential features of an EdTech platform? A robust and supportive database
As all the educational content (video and text study materials, course details, user data, lecture details, or important announcements) will be uploaded to the database, you should have an architecturally powerful and cutting-edge database that is always available to accept access requests.
Not every learner will have a 4G or 5G internet connection; hence the database shouldn’t hang even on low bandwidths. This will allow students to access educational content seamlessly.
Seamless onboarding
Be it any software solution; onboarding the customer into the database is always a process that requires significant brainstorming. Appropriate onboarding is essential due to regulatory requirements and the personalization of the edTech solution.
Onboarding includes the users being able to create their profile with a few steps by either feeding the system with information or by using social media logins. The users should also have a dedicated dashboard, where they can save their personal preferences.
Easy to comprehend user interface
Your edTech solution should provide the users with an intuitive user interface (UI) that is easy to understand and navigate. UI is one of the elements that help your app stand out in the competitive education technology market. Remember, you don’t have to sail on the same boat as your competitors. So, try to create a more superior UI than your edTech solution competitors.
Comprehensive content
Bringing conventional classroom educational content online isn’t easy. It takes a lot of brainstorming and feedback from users to optimize educational content during education app development. The content should be presented in an easy to understand manner.
Your content should be worth reading.
The content should be created specifically for your target audience.
The mobile-friendliness is essential for edTech solutions targeting students.
Interactive sessions enabled with video lectures
Your edTech solution can provide the learners with recorded video lectures that are coupled with separate doubt sessions. Also, your live video lectures can have the facility where students can make queries during the lectures.
After each interactive session, your edTech solution can ask the students to leave their feedback. All of these will boost the user experience and satisfaction with your curriculum. On top of that, you’ll have valuable insights into what needs to be changed on your edTech platform.
Practice sets and mock tests
The educators should be able to upload test papers on the edTech app. The practice sets can be formed using the questions the educators have uploaded in the database. However, to beat your competition, you can allow students to personalize the practice sets according to the difficulty levels.
Push notifications
This feature is a must-have for self-learning apps. Sometimes, the learners lose their pace, and at this stage, your app can notify them with intuitive motivational messages, which may trigger them to start learning again.
For school information systems and other edTech solution types, this feature can alert students about scheduled lectures or tests.
Advanced features that are worth incorporating into your edTech solution
Personalization using AI and ML
Not all the students have the same learning patterns and grasping power, and thus, it is better to provide them with personalized learning materials. Instead of keeping your edTech curriculum in a cookie-cutter format, you can incorporate AI and ML technologies to customize educational material without putting in much effort.
Immersive learning using extended reality
Extended reality technology, such as AR and VR, has already started transforming conventional teaching methods. For instance, history classes are no longer limited to the classroom boundaries; AR/VR technology allows students to immerse themselves in the historic environment.
VR simulators can even enable medical students to practice complex surgeries. The industrial units can conduct virtual safety training exercises for hazardous environments.
Gamification
A few years ago, gamification was considered to be irrelevant for educational apps. With the increased adoption of educational technology, edTech solution providers have started to incorporate gamification into their edTech apps to increase student interest in learning.
Challenges that the students face while playing educational games trigger competitiveness in them. Gamified visuals, reward systems, earning points, and social collaboration are proven to increase student engagement and productivity.
Asset Library
It will help if you build your edTech solution using rich asset libraries, which include stock images, videos, vector graphics, animated GIFs, etc. It will save you a lot of time that you would otherwise be required to spend if you created them manually.