Commentators everywhere are predicting the death of incumbent financial institutions in the face of competition from new, lean, agile entrants to their markets. But the “old” institutions are waking up to the threat and realising that they too can move quickly when they see a threat to their businesses. One of the weapons many see as key in this fight is the use of DevOps to power agile change.

DevOps is about breaking down the siloed, process driven approach to software delivery in favour of a leaner and more collaborative way of working, whilst leveraging automation to reduce the time it takes to deliver code from development into production.

As the competitive landscape is changing, DevOps initiatives are gaining real traction within banks and financial services firm as the industry increasingly feels the need to reinvent itself and drive agility in order to combat #fintech type disruption. In this presentation, we will begin by considering where financial services organisations are typically effective, well placed, or have a head start on their DevOps transformation. The degree of readiness might surprise you, as my experience has shown that in many ways, banks are surprisingly and increasingly DevOps mature relative to other industries.

We will then focus on where banks have lower maturity and more challenging work to do on their DevOps transformation. This will incorporate lots of actionable advice, as I believe that incumbent financial service providers need to more aggressively adopt the patterns that have emerged from the DevOps community in order to remain relevant.

The session will incorporate a number of experience reports and case studies from my DevOps transformation work across banking and financial services. DevOps is easy in theory - it's when the rubber hits the road that things get interesting!