The pressure of digital transformation is greatly impacting the financial services industry. Whether you’re a mature enterprise or an emerging FinTech firm, you must centralize real-time data to make decisions, develop agile and collaborative teams, and remain compliant with constantly changing regulations. And, of course, these communications must remain secure. With increased scrutiny and regulations, the ability to maintain message history and place custom retention settings based on your needs is essential.
Many organizations within the financial services industry are on the journey of introducing DevOps practices to their teams to accelerate the services they provide. Real-time communication is critical to DevOps and helps to reinforce the DevOps culture at each stage. It’s time to move from email, phone calls, or even just “chatting” – and change the way you communicate. Real-time communication should be focused on centralizing the right people and the right data so that you can make decisions quickly. This helps you deliver your services and products more efficiently and much faster.
5 ways Hipchat Data Center is helping the financial services industry:
1. Break silos and improve communications while maintaining privacy
Using Hipchat Data Center, you can create public or private group chat rooms. Public rooms are searchable by anyone in your organization and anyone can join the room. Examples include a “help desk” room, social rooms to help build camaraderie across an organization, and central team rooms where others in the organization can easily find you when questions come up. With private rooms, the room admin or another room member must invite new members, otherwise the room remains hidden to the rest of the organization. These private rooms are great for confidential projects or for teams that must ensure their communications are only accessible to certain people. This is very useful for financial services organizations because the necessity of protecting information due to legal or regulatory needs is high. Example private rooms might contain conversation about a critical security incident, including only people who have clearance for that information. Or, a private room for your trade desk to share sensitive information, or your InfoSec teams need a separate team room where they can share and discuss high priority incidents. For any number of situations, the ability to maintain a level of privacy is essential.
2. Share and easily manage information in real-time
These days, information comes in at warp speed. Many financial services organizations are using a combination of email, phones, documentation collaboration, and many other tools to try to keep each other informed with the most up-to-date information. Using Hipchat Data Center, along with piping in information from external systems directly to your chat rooms, you can also share files and links. These are then accessible in the right hand side bar of the application for quick use and reference. Sometimes, however, there are instances when a room is receiving too much info, that info being piped in – notifications from various systems that you have integrated – gets too noisy. No matter, you simply adjust notification settings per room, which controls how and what you’ll receive, depending on the room and its level of importance to your job. Set as loud – where you receive a notification for every message; normal – where you receive a notification for @mentions, @all and @here messages; or quiet – where you only receive notifications for @mentions. In addition, you can have custom notifications so you get alerted on information that’s important to you based on your priorities.
3. Turn communication into action
With Hipchat Data Center, not only can you centralize information and the right team members, you can help facilitate actions. Improve each individual team’s workflow and their ability to communicate cross-functionally with access to the right information to move faster as an organization. Using Hipchat Connect, connect the most important systems to each room, according to that team’s needs and objectives. Avoid context switching and improve efficiency and speed by taking actions from information directly within Hipchat.
4. Communicate with key external team members
Sometimes you need to communicate with clients, partners, or even vendors when working on a deal. Hipchat Data Center provides guest access which you can turn on or off on a per-room basis. Once you’ve turned guest access on, HipChat generates a link that you can share with people outside your organization. Anyone who has the link can join the room in their browser via the web application. The room’s chat history, including files, are only visible to guests from the point at which they logged in. If they leave the chat and then come back or refresh the web page, they won’t see any history or files from their previous session.
5. Keep it all secure
As a financial services organization, you must maintain the right level of privacy and security across the boundaries of your organization while always preventing inappropriate external access. With Hipchat Data Center you can control how you retain data. Set it up to retain data for a defined time frame per room or globally, or even indefinitely. You can turn features on or off like guest access, set integration governance, and establish permissions for deleting chat history. Also, using Hipchat Data Center’s SAML 2.0, you meet compliance needs, reduce password proliferation, and control application access. Even better, if you have MFA enabled in your identity provider, you can add an additional layer of security for your users as they log in.