Modernizing financial services: A deep dive into Elastic Cloud on AWS for Observability, Security, and more

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In the dynamic landscape of financial services, data is not just currency; it's the key to innovation and operational excellence. Data is constantly streamlining from devices, logins, transfers, transactions, and much more, and it’s bound to increase with an ongoing reliance on digital channels. This creates a massive opportunity and responsibility for financial institutions, as their customers (and regulators) demand more from banking providers.

As the landscape continues to evolve across an increasingly complex ecosystem, Elastic Cloud in AWS Marketplace serves as a key enabler for observability within the banking, insurance, capital markets, and payments sectors. Elastic®’s integration with AWS native services provides financial institutions with unparalleled visibility, security, and efficiency. By harnessing the power of Elasticsearch®, Kibana®, and Logstash®, financial institutions can establish a robust foundation for observability on a fully managed service that empowers institutions to derive actionable insights from vast and complex data sets, optimizing processes and driving strategic decision-making.

In this blog post, we examine several segments of financial services and how providers can benefit from the relationship between Elastic and AWS.

Banking: Observability for customer-centric banking

In banking, data and insights are key — whether it be retail banking, commercial banking, treasury services, mortgages, auto lending, etc. Owners throughout IT, security, and business functions need to understand the right KPIs to ensure the business is moving forward. However, many financial institutions struggle with optimizing this information. For example, data may be sitting in silos or trapped on costly mainframes. Customers may only have access to a limited quantity of data, or service providers may need to search through multiple systems of record to handle a simple customer inquiry.

Elastic Cloud in AWS Marketplace enhances IT and business observability by enabling real-time monitoring of transactions, customer interactions, and security events. With AWS-native services like Amazon CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail, financial institutions can seamlessly integrate Elastic, elevating their ability to detect anomalies, prevent fraud, and deliver a customer-centric banking experience.

Insurance: Optimizing risk management

Insurance carriers have vast amounts of business and machine generated data at their fingertips, providing unlimited potential to better understand the risk environment and customers. Having clear visibility into this data is critical for insurers looking to modernize their core systems to meet customer demands, accelerate digital transformation, and protect assets. At the same time, today’s policyholders expect every interaction to be fast, reliable, and personalized. However, with so much data trapped in disparate areas, or unavailable for immediate consumption, this often becomes a roadblock.

For insurance companies, Elastic Cloud in AWS Marketplace becomes a powerful tool for observability in risk management. Elastic can be leveraged for real-time analysis of claims data, fraud detection, customer behavior, and more — while leveraging AWS services such as AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), so that insurers can ensure secure access to sensitive data.

Capital markets: Enhancing trading and compliance

Success in the front and back office is dependent on the ability to provide accurate, fast responses to challenging questions. Unforeseen headlines, regulatory events, or macro issues will drive volatility and test the bounds of your technology. In order to optimize trading and manage compliance, FSIs are constantly looking to improve visibility across the trade lifecycle. How can you determine business impact when a system goes down? Or keep your team moving through periods of high trading volume? This becomes especially challenging as technology within capital markets becomes increasingly complex.

Capital markets demand precise observability, and Elastic Cloud in AWS Marketplace rises to the challenge. Financial institutions can utilize Elastic to monitor market trends, optimize trading algorithms, and ensure compliance with regulatory standards. By integrating with AWS services like Amazon Kinesis for real-time data streaming and AWS Lambda for serverless computing, FSIs can trade with confidence and ensure stability to protect networks, assets, and clients.

Payments: Ensuring secure and efficient transactions

The payments space is becoming increasingly fragmented with a wide variety of payment and transaction methods deployed across a distributed ecosystem of channels like ACH, wires, real-time payments, digital wallets, and more. With the rapid digitization of payments, customers are also demanding real-time information on all their transactions, with zero-delay, and protection against fraudsters. Payment providers are thus racing to keep up with customer demands, while ensuring their services remain stable, secure, efficient, and optimized to stay ahead of new innovations in the space.

In the payments sector, Elastic Cloud in AWS Marketplace plays a crucial role in observability by monitoring transaction logs, analyzing payment trends, and ensuring the security of financial transactions. AWS services like Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and AWS Lambda complement Elastic, offering a robust platform for payments processing, fraud prevention, and operational efficiency.

Case study: Personal Capital protects its wealth management systems and customers from cyber attacks with Elastic and AWS

With more than 3.3 million users and $22.7 billion in assets under management in the United States, Personal Capital is one of the country’s leading wealth management and financial advice organizations.

In order to protect the organization and its customers from an increasingly expanding attack surface, Personal Capital chose to deploy Elastic Security, using Elastic Cloud on AWS -—enabling them to detect and respond to security issues much quicker than before. Their security teams were able to gain a complete picture of their IT defenses so that no data is overlooked and all errors are addressed.

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Elastic enables us to identify cyber threats that might be lurking on the network. We can track down malicious files and delete them or pull them into the Elastic dashboard for further analysis.

Eric Sekercan, Security Team Lead, Personal Capital

An ally for navigating today’s complex financial landscape

Elastic Cloud in AWS Marketplace emerges as a strategic ally for the financial services industry, providing a comprehensive observability platform that transcends traditional boundaries. From customer-centric banking to risk management, trading optimization, and secure payments processing, the integration with AWS native services amplifies the impact of Elastic. Elastic Cloud in AWS Marketplace also provides financial institutions with advanced security and compliance features. By integrating with AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) for data encryption and AWS CloudTrail for audit trail logging, Elastic enhances observability while ensuring that sensitive financial data remains secure and compliant with industry regulations.

As financial institutions navigate the complexities of the digital age, embracing this dynamic duo becomes not just a choice but a critical step toward achieving data-driven insights, operational efficiency, and unmatched security in an industry where every transaction counts. Get started with a free trial of Elastic Cloud in AWS Marketplace.

The release and timing of any features or functionality described in this post remain at Elastic's sole discretion. Any features or functionality not currently available may not be delivered on time or at all.