App monitoring software to help banks locate service problems

When one of the major banks rolls out the latest version of its mobile banking app next month it will come with a new piece of software code allowing it to forensically determine who is to blame when consumers grumble about the app being slow or unresponsive.

By harnessing an applications monitoring platform which allows software to be monitored at a very granular level, the bank will be able to work out who or what is to blame for problems identified by users.

Software company AppDynamics won't name the bank involved, but Andrew Brockfield, regional sales director, said that in the past when an app hasn't worked as well as expected there had been a "lot of finger pointing" about whose fault it was.

In the future it would be possible to provide banks with empirical data revealing the root cause of the problem, whether it was a software error in the app itself, a problem only affecting certain phones, or an issue only bothering users of a particular telecommunications network.

"It could be something affecting just Vodafone or Android users," Brockfield said. Knowing exactly what the issue was would allow the bank to fix it faster or shift the blame.

Brockfield explained that having that fine-grained understanding of how an application was working was imperative given the complex systems interdependencies that had emerged around banking platforms, which often rely on hardware, software and networking from multiple sources.

While AppDynamics has been deployed by two of the major four banks in Australia, Brockfield said that this was the first time it had been deployed to monitor the performance of a mobile banking app.