Nationwide improves banking systems resilience and service availability with Dynatrace

Nationwide is the world's largest building society and is responsible for one in every eight pounds saved in the UK. It prides itself on providing first class customer service across its physical and digital channels, so business resilience and service availability is critical. This has become even more crucial as the financial services sector has come under regulatory pressure to improve digital systems resilience and minimize outages. To get ahead, Nationwide is transforming its IT operations to be more service-oriented and enable its teams to use data to make better decisions.

Through its transformation, Nationwide wanted to empower its enterprise command center (ECC) to manage the end-to-end customer service journey. Its goal was to focus the ECC on improving service quality, rather than managing individual components in its hybrid cloud technology stack. To enable this, Nationwide adopted an enterprise-wide observability strategy, to drive tool consolidation and reduce the time that ECC teams spend on manual tasks. Ultimately, the objective was to enable the ECC to identify issues as they emerge and resolve them before customers are impacted.

After evaluating the market, Nationwide selected Dynatrace due to its unified platform approach. With Dynatrace, Nationwide would have end-to-end observability across customer service journeys, offering significant potential for tool consolidation. Nationwide also saw the opportunity to automate first-line support work for its ECC with Dynatrace, driving cost efficiencies and freeing the team to focus on resolving incidents that have the greatest potential impact on customers.

“Our services are part of the critical national infrastructure that enables people to pay for their shopping in the supermarket, buy train tickets to get to work, and live their life,” said Paul Walsh, Director of IT Infrastructure and Service Delivery at Nationwide. “Operational resilience is really important to us, because it helps to ensure our customers can access their money when they need to. If something goes wrong, we need to identify where and why really quickly. That’s why we needed a unified approach to observability. Historically, we relied on IT data, but with Dynatrace, we can pair that with business metrics, to help our teams respond faster and support our customers better.”

• Business visibility: Nationwide used Dynatrace to create business service line dashboards, which map the end-to-end customer journey in a single view. By combining technology and business metrics, the ECC can quickly assess the nature, scale, and impact of issues. This helps them to identify how many customers are affected and the total value of failed transactions. The ECC can then prioritize incidents and focus on resolving the most urgent problems first.
• Smarter decisions: Capturing logs alongside metrics, traces, and business events in Dynatrace has driven efficiencies by enabling Nationwide to consolidate its observability tools. Having all these data sources for infrastructure, applications, and synthetic transactions in one platform enables Nationwide to use Davis AI to make smarter and faster decisions, by providing deeper context into the cause of issues.
• Improved resilience: By deploying Dynatrace in its development environments, Nationwide empowered its engineering teams to adopt ‘shift-left’ practices. Whenever they deploy new code, engineers have already identified and resolved bugs, minimizing risk and improving service resilience. With Dynatrace, Nationwide has created observability guardrails, standards, and controls to ensure its engineers are alerted to the most urgent issues at the right time, so they can respond faster to protect the customer service journey.
• Service-oriented operations: Looking to the future, Nationwide will use Dynatrace to trigger self-healing workflows that automatically resolve issues when an alert is raised, reducing the need for the ECC to manually intervene. This capability will be invaluable to Nationwide’s efforts to prevent major issues. If problems do still arise, the building society has service level objectives (SLOs), which, combined with Dynatrace Davis, instantly notify its major incident manager, so they can respond quickly.

“Dynatrace helps us to maintain our always-on services, which saves us time and money, and delivers better outcomes for our customers,” said Kate Bristow, Head of Service Operations at Nationwide. “By having all of our logs, metrics, traces, and business data in Dynatrace, we can see the bigger picture behind an issue. That enables us to understand how our customers are impacted and direct our resources to where they’re needed most. Ultimately, Dynatrace has enabled us to move from a reactive to a proactive approach to service operations, which is improving the resilience of our systems and driving better service availability.”