Operational Visibility Into Real-Time Payments Improves Customer Experience at Cuscal
Executive Summary
Cuscal is Australia’s leading provider of end-to-end payment solutions, comprising mobile payments, fraud prevention and electronic funds transfer (EFT) switching and settlements. Cuscal helps its clients in many industries including financial services, airlines and retail, to make payments easy for their customers. Given the complexities of the banking environment, coupled with the launch of the New Payments Platform (NPP), a real-time payments infrastructure for the Australian economy, Cuscal needed enhanced IT operations and security visibility across the business. Since implementing Splunk Enterprise, Cuscal has experienced benefits such as:
- Real-time insights into complex financial operations
- Increased incident response time by 50 percent
- Improved customer experience
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SPLUNK PRODUCTS
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SPLUNK USE CASES
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- Needed to monitor Cuscal’s infrastructure within a complex transactional environment with high traffic volumes
- Required complete holistic visibility of IT infrastructure
- Needed to ensure the security of sensitive customer financial data
- Greater operational visibility into system health
- Ability to use existing logs for real-time insight without impacting system performance
- Uncompromised customer experience
- 50 percent reduction in incident resolution time ensures clients can reliably use NPP for their customers’ real-time payments
- VMware
- Infrastructure logs
- Application logs
- External sources
Why Splunk
As one of the 13 shareholders of the NPP, Cuscal enables more than 40 financial institutions and other payment service providers to use the platform. Cuscal enabled more than 60 percent of the financial institutions that were live on day one of the NPP in February 2018 – Australia’s new real-time payments system, which automates payments and enables them to move rapidly between accounts at different financial institutions.
Cuscal required a solution that could provide real-time visibility into infrastructure performance and online services, to ensure 100 percent uptime of payments and meet customer expectations.
“We looked at the capabilities that were important to our internal and external stakeholders and determined that Splunk was well-positioned to support the scale of the NPP and our expanding client base,” says Rishi Amin, manager of strategy and architecture, Cuscal.
Since deploying Splunk Enterprise, the time spent on detecting and troubleshooting incidents has been reduced by 50 percent – it now takes, on average, a couple of hours to investigate an incident that may previously have taken days. This performance improvement is critical for ensuring clients can use the NPP to make real-time payments.
“Splunk was already entrenched in the business for security monitoring. We had know-how for operating it, so we leveraged it for IT visibility,” Amin says.
“Splunk Enterprise eases our job in managing various types of logs for multiple stakeholders. We’re excited about partnering with Splunk across different business divisions, to provide our clients and their customers with an enriching experience, as the future of payments evolves.”
Rishi Amin,
Manager of Strategy and Architecture, Cuscal
Operational insights into complex payment platform
Real-time monitoring is critical to the success of the NPP. Cuscal’s clients are transferring money between accounts at different financial institutions within seconds, at any time of the day or night. The insights from Splunk Enterprise provides a complete view of how Cuscal’s infrastructure is performing, resulting in increased service availability.
“The biggest advantage of Splunk is that it enables us to use existing logs for monitoring and real-time insights, without adding any overhead or impacting system performance. We quickly realized how beneficial Splunk could be for investigating and tracking transactions when we built dashboards during the NPP test phase, six months prior to its launch,” Amin says.
Monitoring performance for seamless client experience
Improved customer service is one of the most important benefits Cuscal is gaining with Splunk Enterprise. As Splunk software indexes all available data and provides a consolidated view into all systems, it helps Cuscal to identify the cause of problems more easily and provide a speedier resolution to downtime. Proactive monitoring enables Cuscal to pre-empt any client issues. This has a flow-on impact – clients inform their customers of the problem and when it will be fixed, improving quality of service.
Opening new opportunities for the future of payments
Splunk continues to play a key role in ensuring the security of sensitive customer financial data. Cuscal initially deployed the Splunk App for PCI Compliance to bolster regulatory compliance in 2016. Based on Splunk’s successful integration with Cuscal’s NPP infrastructure, Cuscal is looking to expand the Splunk platform beyond the NPP to other areas of its business. Cuscal is currently rolling out Splunk software in other areas of the enterprise, including Digital.
“Splunk Enterprise eases our job in managing various types of logs for multiple stakeholders. We’re excited about partnering with Splunk across different business divisions, to provide our clients and their customers with an enriching experience, as the future of payments evolves,” concludes Amin.
“Splunk was already entrenched in the business for security monitoring. We had know-how for operating it, so we leveraged it for IT visibility.”
Rishi Amin,
Manager of Strategy and Architecture, Cuscal