Application Performance Management for BFSI
Avekshaa’s Application Performance Management (APM) service keeps business-critical banking, insurance and payments applications fast, available and scalable in production. It is built for CIOs, CTOs and IT operations leaders at regulated financial institutions in India and the UK who already own monitoring tools but still face outages, slow root-cause analysis and failed transactions.
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What is application performance management (APM)?
Application performance management (APM) is the ongoing practice of measuring, protecting and improving how production applications perform for real users. It covers speed, availability and scalability. Monitoring tools tell you something is slow or down. APM as a service goes further: it finds the root cause across the whole stack, fixes it and prevents it from coming back. In BFSI, the measure that matters is whether customer journeys such as login, payment, policy issuance or trade execution complete reliably at peak.
APM vs application performance monitoring vs observability
| Application performance monitoring | Observability | Application performance management (this service) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Core question | Is the application slow or down right now? | Can we explain any system behaviour from its telemetry? | How do we keep critical journeys within target and stop repeat failures? |
| Main output | Dashboards and alerts | Metrics, logs and traces you can query | Root causes fixed, journey SLOs met, fewer incidents |
| Typical owner | Tool or NOC team | Platform/SRE team | Shared with a specialist partner, accountable for outcomes |
| Learn more | Application performance monitoring | Observability services | This page |
Who is this APM service for?
It is for regulated financial institutions whose revenue and reputation depend on digital channels. In India, these are scheduled commercial banks, NBFCs, insurers, payment aggregators and stockbrokers. In the UK, they are banks, building societies, insurers and payments firms. Typical sponsors are:
- CIO / CTO: wants fewer customer-visible incidents and a defensible position with the board and regulator.
- Head of IT Operations / SRE: wants lower MTTR, less alert noise and fewer 2 a.m. war-rooms.
- VP / Head of Engineering: wants releases that do not degrade production performance.
- Head of Digital Banking: wants higher journey completion and conversion on mobile and internet banking.
Why do banks still have outages when they already own APM tools?
Most outages in financial institutions are not caused by a missing tool. They happen because tools watch application code while failures start elsewhere, and nobody owns turning alerts into permanent fixes. Proactive vs reactive APM explained.
Blind spots below the application: databases, load balancers, message queues, network and core-banking layers that conventional APM agents do not instrument.
Downstream dependencies: payment switches, NPCI/UPI rails, card networks, credit bureaus and fintech partners you depend on but cannot see inside.
Change-driven degradation: frequent releases and configuration changes erode performance until a peak day exposes them.
Alert noise, slow RCA: war-rooms spend hours on triage, so mean time to identify (MTTI) and mean time to recover (MTTR) stay high.
Tool sprawl: several tools, no single view of a customer journey, and licence cost that grows faster than insight.
Regulatory and revenue exposure: unplanned downtime now means failed transactions, lost customers and questions from the RBI or FCA/PRA.
What does Avekshaa's APM service include?
We combine full-stack visibility, specialist root-cause engineering and our P-A-S-S™ platform to keep critical financial applications within target, and to stop repeat failures across the entire technology stack.
- Full-stack observability: end-to-end visibility from the user’s device through application code, middleware, databases, load balancers, network and infrastructure, including the layers conventional APM tools skip.
- Journey-level SLOs: targets set for the journeys your customers and regulators care about (login, fund transfer, UPI payment, loan disbursal, claim submission), not only for servers.
- Downstream and third-party monitoring: proactive tracking of the external systems your journeys depend on, so you know whether a failure is yours or a partner’s.
- Proactive prevention with the P-A-S-S™ platform: our proprietary Performance, Availability, Scalability and Security assurance platform. It draws on patterns from 5,000+ resolved production problems to spot risks before they become incidents.
- Root-cause analysis and fixes: specialists who diagnose and fix the cause, not just raise the ticket. When an incident is already live, our production performance troubleshooting team joins the war-room.
- Capacity and peak readiness: headroom planning for salary days, festive sales, IPO days, tax deadlines and quarter-end batch windows.
- Reporting for leadership and audit: availability, MTTI/MTTR and incident RCA evidence in a format your risk, audit and compliance teams can use.
How does an APM engagement work?
- Assess: map critical journeys and their dependencies, review current tools, incidents and alert quality, and agree baseline availability, response time and success-rate figures.
- Instrument and baseline: close visibility gaps across the stack, define journey SLOs and alert thresholds, and cut noise.
- Prevent and optimise: fix the top recurring root causes, tune code, database and infrastructure, and plan capacity for known peaks.
- Operate and improve: run continuous APM as a managed service or alongside your SRE team, with monthly reviews against the SLOs.
We start with your top three critical journeys.
APM use cases across BFSI
| Segment | Critical journeys | Typical production risk | What APM delivers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Banks | Internet and mobile banking, core banking (e.g. Finacle), CRM, branch and ATM channels | Slow logins, timeouts at peak, batch overruns, outages after migration | Faster response times, fewer channel outages, stable core after change |
| Payments | UPI, IMPS, card authorisation, payment gateways, Faster Payments | Failed or pending transactions, switch and partner latency | Higher transaction success rate, clear proof of where a failure sits |
| Insurers | Quote and buy, policy issuance, renewals, claims portals | Slow quote engines, drop-off at payment, renewal-season peaks | Higher journey completion, peak readiness |
| NBFCs and lenders | Loan origination, KYC, bureau checks, disbursal | Third-party API latency, slow decisioning | Faster application-to-disbursal, higher conversion |
| Capital markets | Trading apps, order management, market-open and IPO days | Burst traffic at market open, latency-sensitive failures | Headroom for burst load, lower latency under peak |
Related reading: how to keep UPI systems available at peak and how banks can reach 99.99% uptime for digital payments.
How does APM help with RBI, UK operational resilience and PCI DSS expectations?
Regulators in both markets now expect firms to know which services are critical, how long those services can be disrupted, and how quickly they recover. APM provides the measurement and evidence behind those answers. It does not replace your compliance programme.
| Regime | What it expects (in brief) | How APM helps |
|---|---|---|
| RBI Master Direction on IT Governance, Risk, Controls and Assurance Practices (India, effective April 2024) | Board-level oversight of IT risk, management of the availability and capacity of critical systems, and incident handling with root-cause analysis | Availability and capacity data for critical applications, incident timelines and RCA evidence, and trend reporting for the IT Strategy and Risk committees |
| FCA PS21/3 and PRA SS1/21 operational resilience (UK) | Identify important business services, set impact tolerances, and stay within them during severe but plausible disruption (in force since 31 March 2025) | Maps each important business service to its applications and dependencies, tracks journey-level SLOs against tolerances (time, volume, value), and alerts before a breach |
| DORA (EU operations of UK and Indian groups) | ICT risk management, incident classification and reporting, and resilience testing | Incident detection and classification data, plus performance evidence for resilience testing |
| PCI DSS v4.0 | Logging and monitoring of systems in the cardholder data environment | Continuous monitoring of payment-path availability and anomalies, to complement your security monitoring |
For more on the UK rules, read how performance testing keeps you within FCA/PRA impact tolerances. This section is general information, not legal or regulatory advice.
Results: APM for a Tier 1 Indian bank
Our dedicated emphasis on Performance, Availability, and Scalability has empowered our clients to elevate the speed, reliability, and triumphant success of their business applications.
Application Performance Management Solution for a Bank
Avekshaa delivered an Application Performance Management solution for an Indian bank. Avekshaa helped in improving the Quality of Service across critical-platinum / Tier 1 applications like Internet banking, Mobile banking, Payment apps. CRM, etc. within the bank.
- Success rate of payment transactions improved from 93.9% to 99.9%.
- Scalability improvement between 30-40%. Reduction in Infra and overall cost.
- Increase in user experience – 25-30% Improvement in response time across critical scenarios.
- Increase in user productivity – Call Center reported 95% less calls due to P-A-S issues.
- Improvement in Conversion Rate – 20% improvement in loan application to disbursement journey.
Want to know where your critical journeys are at risk?
Book a 30-minute consultation. A senior performance engineer will review your top three critical journeys and show where APM will have the biggest impact.
Our clients simply love our work
Reliance Industries’ technology leaders talk about the importance of proactive performance engineering and the role Avekshaa played in successful performance engineering of one of the largest Digital transformation programs in the world involving 100 million+ users with 10-20 million concurrency.
Avekshaa brings in best in class expertise, domain experience, rich case studies and above all highly professional processes and methodologies which deliver truly world class results. Their solutions in the Performance engineering and optimization space – like improving performance, availability and scalability of business-critical IT systems are proactive and holistic with a clear long term in the perspective.
Avekshaa constantly strives to go the extra mile to exceed the expectations hence positioning them amongst the leaders. We are extremely happy with our association with them and look forward for an ongoing partnership with Avekshaa to deliver best in class solutions to our clients. Wish Avekshaa the very best always.
Mr. Rajeswar, Member of Board-Advisory Genisys Group, Evangelist Technology, Strategy and Business Excellence
Why partner with Avekshaa for application performance management?
Proactive by design
We focus on preventing performance, availability and scalability failures, not just reporting them.
Specialists, not generalists
Performance engineering is all we do, backed by 5,000+ solved production problems.
Proven at extreme scale
Performance engineering for a programme with 100 million+ users and 10–20 million concurrent users.
BFSI depth
Core banking, payments, CRM and digital channels for leading Indian banks and insurers.
Business outcomes
Higher transaction success, lower infrastructure cost and better customer experience.
Will this work with our existing APM and observability tools?
Yes. The service is tool-agnostic. We work with the APM, logging and observability tools you already license, such as AppDynamics, and with OpenTelemetry-based stacks. We fill the visibility gaps those tools leave rather than asking you to replace them. Where tool sprawl is driving up cost, we recommend which tools to consolidate.
Managed APM service vs an in-house team: which is right?
| In-house only | Managed APM with Avekshaa | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to impact | Hiring and ramp-up first | Starts with an assessment of your critical journeys |
| Depth of root-cause expertise | Limited to your own incident history | Patterns from 5,000+ production problems across BFSI |
| Coverage | Often application layer only | Full stack, plus downstream and third-party dependencies |
| Best fit | Mature SRE teams with low incident volume | Firms with recurring incidents, peak-day risk or regulatory deadlines, or a hybrid model alongside your SRE team |
How should a bank choose an APM partner?
- Proven BFSI production outcomes with named metrics, not just tool certifications.
- Full-stack depth: database, middleware, network and core-banking experience, not only code-level tracing.
- Tool-agnostic advice, with no incentive to sell you more licences.
- Regulatory fluency: RBI expectations in India, and FCA/PRA impact tolerances in the UK.
- Information security: ISO/IEC 27001 certification and clear data-handling controls.
- Delivery in your market: Avekshaa has teams in Bengaluru and the UK (Sheffield and London).
Frequently asked questions
What is application performance management in banking?
Application performance management in banking is the continuous practice of keeping critical banking applications fast, available and scalable in production. It covers internet and mobile banking, payments, core banking and CRM. It combines full-stack monitoring with root-cause analysis and fixes, so customer journeys complete reliably at peak and incidents do not repeat.
What is the difference between APM and observability?
Observability is the ability to understand system behaviour from its metrics, logs and traces. APM uses that telemetry to manage outcomes: setting journey targets, finding root causes, fixing them and preventing repeat failures. Observability is the foundation; APM is what you do with it.
We already use an APM tool. Why do we still have outages?
Most tools instrument application code, while many BFSI outages start in databases, load balancers, networks, core systems or third-party dependencies. Tools also generate alerts but do not fix root causes. A specialist APM service closes those visibility gaps and owns the fix.
How does APM reduce MTTR?
APM reduces MTTR by tracing each failing journey across every tier, so teams see the faulty component in minutes instead of debating it in a war-room. It also cuts alert noise and builds runbooks from previous incidents, and it fixes recurring root causes so the same incident does not come back.
Can APM improve UPI and digital payment success rates?
Yes. APM pinpoints where failed or pending transactions originate: your application, database, switch or an external rail or partner. You can then fix your own bottlenecks and hold partners to account. At one Indian bank, payment success rose from 93.9% to 99.9%.
How does APM support RBI IT governance expectations?
The RBI’s Master Direction on IT Governance expects regulated entities to manage the availability and capacity of critical systems and to analyse incidents. APM provides the availability, capacity and root-cause evidence that IT Strategy and Risk committees and auditors ask for.
How does APM help UK firms stay within FCA/PRA impact tolerances?
APM maps each important business service to the applications and dependencies behind it. It tracks journey-level performance against your impact tolerances and alerts before a tolerance is at risk. This gives you real-time evidence, not just an annual self-assessment.
Is a managed APM service better than building an in-house team?
It depends on your incident volume and in-house maturity. A managed or hybrid service gives you specialist root-cause expertise and full-stack coverage straight away. That suits firms with recurring incidents, peak-day risk or regulatory deadlines. Many clients run a hybrid model alongside their own SRE team.
How long does it take to see results?
Most clients see value first from the assessment, which identifies their top recurring root causes and visibility gaps on critical journeys. Measurable improvements in availability and response time follow as those fixes go live. We agree baselines and targets at the start.
How is an APM engagement priced?
Engagements are usually scoped as a fixed-price assessment, followed by an ongoing managed APM service sized to the number of critical applications and journeys. Urgent production troubleshooting is available as a separate engagement. Book a consultation for a scoped estimate.
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Ready to stop surprise failures in your critical applications?
Tell us which journeys keep you up at night. A senior performance engineer will review them with you and outline where APM will have the biggest impact. Prefer to pick a time? Book an APM consultation.