Skip to main content

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

Hot Topics

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...

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

Hot Topics

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...