Bangkok Bank extends New Relic deal to boost digital banking

Bangkok Bank has expanded its multi-year agreement with New Relic to standardise on the company's observability platform, enhancing operational stability and digital customer experiences for its rapidly growing mobile banking user base.

As Thailand's largest commercial bank by total assets, Bangkok Bank has relied on New Relic's fully integrated platform, including Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) tools, since 2020 to oversee and optimise its mobile app operations. The bank's move comes amid the dominance of mobile banking in Thailand, which now accounts for 93% of consumer banking transactions.

The expanded agreement will allow Bangkok Bank to integrate new features such as intelligent dashboards and dynamic service mapping. These tools are designed to give the bank a comprehensive operational overview, proactively surface latency issues or errors, and enable faster resolution before customer experiences are adversely impacted.

Strategy and approach

By leveraging New Relic's AI-driven alert systems, Bangkok Bank has been able to refine its approach to incident response. The system reduces the occurrence of false positive alerts and prioritises notifications based on both urgency and potential impact. This empowers the bank to pre-emptively address operational incidents, maintaining service reliability across its customer base.

"Thailand's rapid digital adoption and government initiatives around instant payments have created a new climate of banking innovation," said Bangkok Bank Senior Executive Vice President Ian Guy Gillard. "Our mobile banking app isn't just a tool; it's a daily essential for millions. This means we see intense transaction spikes throughout the month. With increased visibility created by New Relic, we can cut through the complexity to proactively manage these peak periods and ensure a seamless digital customer experience."

Gillard continued by noting the essential role New Relic plays in underpinning trust in the bank's digital services. "At Bangkok Bank, reliability is the foundation of customer trust, and New Relic empowers us to deliver exactly that. By providing a single source of truth, New Relic enables us to monitor and understand customer journeys in real-time, act on issues before they escalate, and optimize performance during peak periods. Whether it's pinpointing issues with other financial networks or coordinating efforts across internal teams, New Relic enables us to adopt a proactive, data-driven approach to decision-making, with the partnership enhancing both our team's productivity and our ability to provide exceptional experiences for customers."

Performance and operational outcomes

The agreement includes the continued use of New Relic's DEM capabilities - specifically mobile and browser monitoring, customer journeys, crash analytics, and custom dashboards. These are integrated with broader performance monitoring across applications, infrastructure, and Kubernetes environments, replacing previously siloed systems with a unified monitoring solution.

According to Bangkok Bank, these initiatives have resulted in several measurable outcomes: improved system uptime by 90%, a reduction in the mean time to recovery (MTTR) by 70%, and a decrease in the mean time between failures (MTBF) by over 65%. Proactive AI-based alerts notified the bank of impending issues throughout 2024, helping the bank remain well below the annual service downtime targets set by the Bank of Thailand.

Custom executive dashboards have also been implemented to provide senior management with real-time visibility into system health and business impact. The bank reports that this has improved transparency and trust between technical and business leadership.

"New Relic has transformed how we operate by offering end-to-end visibility into our systems," Gillard added. "Instead of piecing together data from multiple tools, we now have a single source of truth, which allows us to analyse issues faster. This not only enhances our technical team productivity but also ensures that we are consistently delivering exceptional service to our customers."

Mobile banking growth and future plans

Bangkok Bank's mobile platform processes instant transactions in 13 currencies directly, without reliance on third-party payment networks. The bank's operational model calls for a robust and agile IT infrastructure, supported by the visibility tools provided by New Relic. This includes aiding in active user monitoring and forecasting usage trends for capacity planning.

The bank is evaluating New Relic's broader AI-powered capabilities with the aim of further enhancing its predictive monitoring and issue resolution processes, supporting its strategy to remain at the forefront of Thailand's digital banking sector.

New Relic Chief Customer Officer Arnie Lopez commented on the partnership, stating, "Bangkok Bank's vision for digital modernization is inspiring, and we are proud to be their observability partner of choice. We take pride in supporting their mission to deliver cutting-edge banking services while ensuring reliability and scalability. Together, we are setting new benchmarks for innovation in the Asian financial sector."