Agile Procurement in Financial Services

Ben Henshall
Red Hat

In today's ever-changing business landscape, more and more companies are operating like software companies. Through the adoption of agile technologies, financial firms can begin to use software to both operate more effectively and be faster to market with improvements for customer experiences. Making sure there is the necessary software in place to give customers frictionless everyday activities, like remote deposits, business overdraft services and wealth management, is key for a positive customer experience.

It has long been established that procurement is an important stage in the adoption of technology to drive innovative investments in the financial services industry. And just as the business looks to be more agile in the use of technology, the technology supplied need to be available to the business quickly. This gives way to the notion of agile procurement.

Agile procurement is the idea that the supply of technologies and the associated services can also be acquired in a flexible, agile manner. Agile procurement follows a similar principal as agile development and operations (DevOps) practices in that it introduces new policies and ways of working and can become a better means of accelerating procurement of next-gen applications. Agile procurement processes work to improve technology adoption to be more timely and in step with business and development teams. Indeed, improving collaboration across teams and improving technology vetting processes, policies and organizational barriers in this redefinition of procurement procedures.

In today's business landscape, it is important that companies work quickly and are not bogged down by long lead times and requirements gathering, slow feedback cycles, multi-tier governance and approval policies. And when these detriments to speed to market are combined, they can stymie company goals leaving customer needs unfilled. Agile procurement is focused on the longer term success and adoption of technology, focusing the results that can be gleaned from applying new, innovative technology in practice, rather than in concept. Starting with business and technology teams agreeing on a specific minimally viable product (MVP) necessary to reach the desired business outcomes, a portion of the procurement budget is used to acquire only the necessary technology to use in the pilot.

This more inclusive decision-making replaces process, focused on business outcomes counters traditional, central planning approaches and by default, makes processes more agile given all parties needs are included from the start. The focus is then able to turn to delivering code and features into a production-ready application within tight timeframes. During this process, development, testing and ops, in addition to an assessment of a technology's impact on policy, processes and people are considered, so that the impact of the application and associated technology adoption become integral to the pilot process. This in turn, alleviates the traditional after-thought of technology acquisition, namely adoption.

In order to have agile procurement, financial services first must ensure they have agile development in place — in fact the two, hand-in-hand makes it easier to be able to keep up with changing market factors and business requirements.

One of the main outcomes of agile procurement is that compared to traditional procurement methods, it results in lower procurement and production costs. It costs far less to make changes to MVP deployment done in a short production window (especially with a microservices approach) than one done over a longer period of time, using processes that don't account for micro-adjustments. This is partly because when agile procurement is in place, the organization can more quickly develop and deliver code, and the quicker code is delivered, the longer the company has to cross-sell and pursue other revenue-generating options.

Agile procurement can lead to positive business outcomes, and the culture and road to get there is quickly realized with the use of enterprise open source. Secured by design for organizations, enterprise open source is a path to new, innovative technologies. Organizations that have agile procurement in place can more quickly adapt to business change, solve shared problems faster and use open source standards to preserve business agility while cutting down costs and providing new innovations that can keep up with business needs and customer demands.

Ben Henshall is Senior Director, Financial Services, at Red Hat

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

As AI Scales Across Enterprises, Breaking Points Emerge

Rapid AI adoption and the unique ways AI workloads operate is redefining the scope and structure of what these teams must deliver. This shift is forcing organizations to rethink how they manage scale, automation, and control, according to The State of SRE and Platform Engineering 2026, a new report from Dynatrace ...

Preparing Network Infrastructure for AI Starts with the Basics

AI is usually talked about as a software tool, but it also depends heavily on the network behind it. Whether a company is using AI for chatbots, automation, monitoring, analytics, or employee support, all of that information has to move across the network in a reliable and secure way. That means AI is not just an application decision. It is also an infrastructure decision. Before organizations rush into AI, they should ask a simple question: Is our network ready to support it? ...

Agentic Operations Begin with Governed Middleware Access

Enterprise AI often lacks governed access to where business processes actually execute. Without that access, AI agents may be able to reason, but they cannot operate reliably across enterprise workflows. For AI agents to effectively carry out workflows, they will require integration-layer context and controls. Organizations can implement these prerequisites by providing AI with managed access to the middleware layer ...

The Network Data Problem Slowing Down Enterprise AIOps

Enterprise networks rarely behave the same way for very long. A routing adjustment in one region may unexpectedly alter application performance in another. A cloud migration may introduce hidden dependencies that go unnoticed until an outage occurs. All the while, the network is managed by several different teams, each of whom use different tool sets — and as a result, have different views of the network ... There’s usually an engineer who remembers why traffic fails over a certain way between sites, or which transparent firewall was added where. The problem is that human memory cannot scale alongside enterprise-scale networks ...

The Governance Gap Behind AI's Infrastructure Problem

Ask an infrastructure team how confident they are in their ability to govern AI, and most will tell you they've got it handled. A recent survey of 406 IT decision-makers and platform engineering leaders found 86% expressing exactly that confidence. Ask the same group whether they have a formal written AI governance policy, and the number drops to 30%, according to Spacelift's Infrastructure Automation Report ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 27: Observability Unification

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 27, Shamus McGillicuddy, EMA VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, and Parker Hathcock, EMA Research Director covering IT Service/Operations (ServiceOps), discuss observability unification in modern IT operations ... 

5 Reasons Traditional VPNs Struggle in a Cloud-First World

Virtual Private Networks became a cornerstone of enterprise security at a time when corporate infrastructure looked very different from today ... For years, this model worked well. But the architecture behind VPNs assumed a centralized corporate environment—one where the network itself was the hub of activity. In a cloud — first world, that assumption no longer holds ...

What 1.8 Million Outages Say About Who Is Really On Call in August

Website outages get resolved just as fast in August as they do in November. I went looking for the opposite: the summer slowdown everyone assumes is there once the people who fix things are away. It isn't in the data we collected, covering 1.8 million confirmed outages across tens of thousands of websites ...

Why Enterprises Are So Unhappy with Their IT Infrastructure

This year, many of the cloud infrastructure contracts signed in the early days of the AI boom will come up for renewal. As the year goes on, I anticipate we'll see a significant amount of cloud vendor swapouts and multi-cloud adoption, and the reason isn't just GPU depreciation. It's because they're tired of their current cloud providers ...

Agentic AI Just Became Your Newest Production Dependency. Are You Tracking It Like One?

There's a moment the many observability teams have experienced days into bringing a new service into production: you realize that the vendor's claims of "intelligent" behavior included a large serving of hype. Their dashboards look nice until they don't, the failure modes are a black box, and no one on the team can confidently explain why the system did what it did at 2 am. Agentic AI is about to force every Ops team to relive that moment at web-scale until they start treating these systems as the dependencies they actually are ...

Agile Procurement in Financial Services

Ben Henshall
Red Hat

In today's ever-changing business landscape, more and more companies are operating like software companies. Through the adoption of agile technologies, financial firms can begin to use software to both operate more effectively and be faster to market with improvements for customer experiences. Making sure there is the necessary software in place to give customers frictionless everyday activities, like remote deposits, business overdraft services and wealth management, is key for a positive customer experience.

It has long been established that procurement is an important stage in the adoption of technology to drive innovative investments in the financial services industry. And just as the business looks to be more agile in the use of technology, the technology supplied need to be available to the business quickly. This gives way to the notion of agile procurement.

Agile procurement is the idea that the supply of technologies and the associated services can also be acquired in a flexible, agile manner. Agile procurement follows a similar principal as agile development and operations (DevOps) practices in that it introduces new policies and ways of working and can become a better means of accelerating procurement of next-gen applications. Agile procurement processes work to improve technology adoption to be more timely and in step with business and development teams. Indeed, improving collaboration across teams and improving technology vetting processes, policies and organizational barriers in this redefinition of procurement procedures.

In today's business landscape, it is important that companies work quickly and are not bogged down by long lead times and requirements gathering, slow feedback cycles, multi-tier governance and approval policies. And when these detriments to speed to market are combined, they can stymie company goals leaving customer needs unfilled. Agile procurement is focused on the longer term success and adoption of technology, focusing the results that can be gleaned from applying new, innovative technology in practice, rather than in concept. Starting with business and technology teams agreeing on a specific minimally viable product (MVP) necessary to reach the desired business outcomes, a portion of the procurement budget is used to acquire only the necessary technology to use in the pilot.

This more inclusive decision-making replaces process, focused on business outcomes counters traditional, central planning approaches and by default, makes processes more agile given all parties needs are included from the start. The focus is then able to turn to delivering code and features into a production-ready application within tight timeframes. During this process, development, testing and ops, in addition to an assessment of a technology's impact on policy, processes and people are considered, so that the impact of the application and associated technology adoption become integral to the pilot process. This in turn, alleviates the traditional after-thought of technology acquisition, namely adoption.

In order to have agile procurement, financial services first must ensure they have agile development in place — in fact the two, hand-in-hand makes it easier to be able to keep up with changing market factors and business requirements.

One of the main outcomes of agile procurement is that compared to traditional procurement methods, it results in lower procurement and production costs. It costs far less to make changes to MVP deployment done in a short production window (especially with a microservices approach) than one done over a longer period of time, using processes that don't account for micro-adjustments. This is partly because when agile procurement is in place, the organization can more quickly develop and deliver code, and the quicker code is delivered, the longer the company has to cross-sell and pursue other revenue-generating options.

Agile procurement can lead to positive business outcomes, and the culture and road to get there is quickly realized with the use of enterprise open source. Secured by design for organizations, enterprise open source is a path to new, innovative technologies. Organizations that have agile procurement in place can more quickly adapt to business change, solve shared problems faster and use open source standards to preserve business agility while cutting down costs and providing new innovations that can keep up with business needs and customer demands.

Ben Henshall is Senior Director, Financial Services, at Red Hat

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

As AI Scales Across Enterprises, Breaking Points Emerge

Rapid AI adoption and the unique ways AI workloads operate is redefining the scope and structure of what these teams must deliver. This shift is forcing organizations to rethink how they manage scale, automation, and control, according to The State of SRE and Platform Engineering 2026, a new report from Dynatrace ...

Preparing Network Infrastructure for AI Starts with the Basics

AI is usually talked about as a software tool, but it also depends heavily on the network behind it. Whether a company is using AI for chatbots, automation, monitoring, analytics, or employee support, all of that information has to move across the network in a reliable and secure way. That means AI is not just an application decision. It is also an infrastructure decision. Before organizations rush into AI, they should ask a simple question: Is our network ready to support it? ...

Agentic Operations Begin with Governed Middleware Access

Enterprise AI often lacks governed access to where business processes actually execute. Without that access, AI agents may be able to reason, but they cannot operate reliably across enterprise workflows. For AI agents to effectively carry out workflows, they will require integration-layer context and controls. Organizations can implement these prerequisites by providing AI with managed access to the middleware layer ...

The Network Data Problem Slowing Down Enterprise AIOps

Enterprise networks rarely behave the same way for very long. A routing adjustment in one region may unexpectedly alter application performance in another. A cloud migration may introduce hidden dependencies that go unnoticed until an outage occurs. All the while, the network is managed by several different teams, each of whom use different tool sets — and as a result, have different views of the network ... There’s usually an engineer who remembers why traffic fails over a certain way between sites, or which transparent firewall was added where. The problem is that human memory cannot scale alongside enterprise-scale networks ...

The Governance Gap Behind AI's Infrastructure Problem

Ask an infrastructure team how confident they are in their ability to govern AI, and most will tell you they've got it handled. A recent survey of 406 IT decision-makers and platform engineering leaders found 86% expressing exactly that confidence. Ask the same group whether they have a formal written AI governance policy, and the number drops to 30%, according to Spacelift's Infrastructure Automation Report ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 27: Observability Unification

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 27, Shamus McGillicuddy, EMA VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, and Parker Hathcock, EMA Research Director covering IT Service/Operations (ServiceOps), discuss observability unification in modern IT operations ... 

5 Reasons Traditional VPNs Struggle in a Cloud-First World

Virtual Private Networks became a cornerstone of enterprise security at a time when corporate infrastructure looked very different from today ... For years, this model worked well. But the architecture behind VPNs assumed a centralized corporate environment—one where the network itself was the hub of activity. In a cloud — first world, that assumption no longer holds ...

What 1.8 Million Outages Say About Who Is Really On Call in August

Website outages get resolved just as fast in August as they do in November. I went looking for the opposite: the summer slowdown everyone assumes is there once the people who fix things are away. It isn't in the data we collected, covering 1.8 million confirmed outages across tens of thousands of websites ...

Why Enterprises Are So Unhappy with Their IT Infrastructure

This year, many of the cloud infrastructure contracts signed in the early days of the AI boom will come up for renewal. As the year goes on, I anticipate we'll see a significant amount of cloud vendor swapouts and multi-cloud adoption, and the reason isn't just GPU depreciation. It's because they're tired of their current cloud providers ...

Agentic AI Just Became Your Newest Production Dependency. Are You Tracking It Like One?

There's a moment the many observability teams have experienced days into bringing a new service into production: you realize that the vendor's claims of "intelligent" behavior included a large serving of hype. Their dashboards look nice until they don't, the failure modes are a black box, and no one on the team can confidently explain why the system did what it did at 2 am. Agentic AI is about to force every Ops team to relive that moment at web-scale until they start treating these systems as the dependencies they actually are ...