Seeing the Unseen: Why Observability is Crucial for Corporate Banking

The Complex World of Corporate Banking

Corporate banking serves large enterprises, MNCs, government entities, and high-net-worth clients. Each client engagement tends to be relationship-driven, customized, and strategic, often involving complex financial structures across multiple locations.

Most of the services cater to critical, time-sensitive, and high-value financial transaction flows in corporates. Here’s a quick overview of the typical functions and workflows in corporate banking:

Fig 1: Corporate banking functions

These workflows are not simple. They traverse multiple interconnected systems, partner interfaces, document flows, and compliance checks while adhering to strict SLAs and client expectations. These include:

• Core banking systems (CBS), Payment gateways, and Clearing systems
• APIs, ERP integrations, and third-party fintechs
• Trade finance, Credit, and Treasury operations
• Virtual account platforms and FX trading engines
• Regulatory compliances like Basel IV, ISO20022, DORA, SEBI, etc.

Fig 2: Sample international payments flow in corporate banking

Corporate banking clients demand always-on service with instant updates, and they expect all these services to be delivered digitally and instantly. Their expectations include:

• Banking-as-a-service that embeds banking within their system, enabling 24×7 and real-time account management, automated reconciliations, and instant payments
• Virtual account support for centralized cash control across business units and geographies
• Customised AI-driven tools that provide real-time insights into liquidity, working capital, credit risk, payments, settlements, FX exposure, and more.
• GenAI-powered frontlines offering personalized, informed interaction and quicker resolutions
• Regulatory compliance with timely reporting, AML, and ESG transparency
• Non-intrusive, agent-less API-based integration with their ERP, TMS, and accounting platforms

How Banks Are Responding and What’s Holding Them Back?

To meet these rising demands, banks are evolving. Some are building new digital platforms, while others are partnering with fintechs to extend capabilities. Many are investing in modern technologies like event-driven architecture, Kafka queues, structured logging,and API-first systems.

However, transformation isn’t easy. Most banks still rely on legacy systems extended over time through integrations and bolt-on solutions, resulting in a fragmented infrastructure characterised by

• Silo-ed and inconsistent data formats across documents, systems, and partners
• Minimal context of event and data limiting complete visibility across the transaction journey, like payments, settlements, and cash flow
• Complex integrations and APIs that increase the risk of failure
• Challenges in adopting newer compliance standards, such as ISO 20022

In corporate banking, where timing, precision, and reliability are key, such a fragmented infrastructure could cause SLA breaches, FX mismatches, and reconciliation errors, which don’t surface easily due to poor visibility.

Why Business Observability is the Missing Link

Tracking every step across these high-value, time-sensitive workflows is incredibly complex. But it is essential to have complete visibility and measurement of these journeys across technology, data, transactions, and users. Business observability provides visibility by:

• Tracking multi-step workflows (e.g., trade finance or payments) across internal and external systems
• Correlating events across data pipelines, applications, and infrastructure
• Generating real-time alerts when failures or delays occur
• Delivering insights to help operations teams take proactive actions
• Using AI/ML to predict risk and optimize performance
• Empowering frontline teams to provide quick resolutions and proactive communication through an intuitive dashboard – extensible to clients too

Whether it’s a failed FX trade, a missed Letter of Credit (LC) expiry, delayed reconciliation, or a liquidity mismatch, observability identifies the issue early, helps resolve it fast, and prevents it from recurring.

How VuNet Helps: Built for Banking, Designed for Complexity

VuNet’s Business-Centric Observability Platform, vuSmartMaps™, is purpose-built for the challenges of modern banking. It is a next-generation full-stack observability solution built using big data and machine learning to monitor business journeys and improve transaction experiences.

The platform’s business-centric approach ensures that technical performance is always viewed through its business impact, making it ideal for the relationship-driven nature of corporate banking.

Fig 3: VuNet Platform’s capability for corporate banking

Key Capabilities:

• Deep Domain Awareness

VuNet understands banking processes (such as customer onboarding, payments and settlements, KYC authorizations, EOD reconciliation, and regulatory reporting) and the complexities involved in these workflows spanning multiple systems and APIs, involving batch jobs, manual steps, and validations. We have built this domain knowledge into our platform, enabling real-time monitoring of critical operations.

Fig 4: Sample view of end-to-end payment processing flow in VuNet’s Platform

• 3T Correlation Engine (Time, Topology, Transaction)

Our patented correlation engine links fragmented signals and data into a unified view so you see what failed and why it failed.

• AI-Powered, Data-Centric Observability

AI/ML models detect anomalies, provide RCA, predict issues, and reduce alert fatigue—enabling smarter, faster decision-making.

• Unified Observability with Domain-Centric Adaptors and OpenTelemetry

Our platform supports real-time data ingestion via OpenTelemetry Protocol and banking-specific adaptors with minimal changes to legacy systems. This helps preserve data fidelity while reducing infrastructure complexity.

• Unified Journey Maps

Visualize each transaction from cash flows to settlements and forex in a real-time graph view, including dependencies, APIs, and system touchpoints.

• Real-Time Dashboards and Custom Views

From cash position to SLA monitoring, VuNet delivers custom dashboards for ops, risk, compliance, and client teams. Proprietary features like User Experience Index (UEI) help measure and improve user experience.

Fig 5: Sample dashboard view in VuNet’s Platform

• Compliance and Reporting

The platform enables unique banking compliance requirements through audit-ready reporting and traceability enabled by capturing enriched data for every transaction journey..

Capabilities That Meet Banking’s Unique Needs:

Banking operations rely heavily on APIs to connect with partner ecosystems and batch jobs & asynchronous flows to process large, critical workloads. Most of these critical workflows involve manual steps such as scrutiny, authorizations etc. VuNet’s platform brings the visibility needed to ensure reliable performance of these workflows. Here’s how:

API Performance Governance and Security
Continuously ingest and correlate logs from APIs involved in key workflows like payments, authentication, and authorization. Monitor API latency, detect failures, pinpoint root causes (such as integration or payload issues), flag suspicious activity using AI/ML, and analyse performance trends by client or other parameters.

Fig 6: Sample dashboard showing API insights

Batch Jobs Performance Visibility and Reliability
Ingest and correlate batch job logs to validate and enrich data. Map job dependencies to offer a complete view of transactions, helping detect and prevent downstream impact from delays or failures. Enable automated retries to reduce manual intervention. 

Fig 7: Sample Dashboard displaying health and performance of Batch Jobs

Asynchronous Jobs Visibility
Track asynchronous calls in a transaction journey and provide the true TAT of a transaction. By tracking transaction and session IDs across logs, metrics, events, and traces and stitching the data to form a journey view, complete visibility of a transaction journey is provided. This helps assess the true impact of any delays in the transaction on customer experience.

Examples of Corporate Banking Observability Use Cases and VuNet Solution

Key Benefits of VuNet’s Business Observability:

Proactive Risk Management

• Actionable insights on SLAs, risks, and key business metrics to drive smarter planning and faster decisions
• Real-time compliance monitoring and regulatory adherence

Enhanced Client Experience

• Proactive communication about service issues and resolutions
• Faster issue resolution through automated workflows

Operational Excellence

• End-to-end visibility across transaction journeys
• Automated detection and handling of exceptions

Regulatory Compliance

• Continuous monitoring of regulatory SLAs, automated reporting, and validation for compliance submissions
• Complete audit trails with timestamped traceability of every transaction

Final Thoughts

Corporate banking is evolving and becoming faster, more connected, and more demanding. To keep up, banks must do more than digitize. They need deep, real-time visibility across every transaction, system, and interaction.

Business observability can be a strategic advantage. It gives banks the power to see what’s happening, understand why, and act before the impact grows.

With VuNet, banks don’t just see more, but they understand more, act faster, and build stronger relationships with their most valuable clients.