APAC customers have high expectations around instant payments, open banking, and mobile-first experiences. In March 2025, India’s real-time payment system, UPI went down for five hours. Millions experienced payment failures, failed fund transfers, and login errors and many vented their frustrations on social media.
With banking and payment disruptions on the rise, regulators are calling for proof of resilience.
The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority’s CPS 230 standard took effect in July 2025, mandating full operational risk management, while Hong Kong’s Monetary Authority’s OR-2 Operational Resilience policy requires banks to be fully compliant by May 2026.
Between customer and regulator expectations, there’s no room for gaps — you need unified visibility across frontend and backend to make sure critical core banking services work.
That’s where Synthetic Transaction Monitoring (STM) and API monitoring can help.
Close the gap between system health and transaction success
Think of your website or web app as a car that needs servicing.
API monitoring and STM are two halves of the same checkup.
API monitoring checks under the hood, validating the “engine” and internal components of your systems from the inside out. It ensures your APIs are available, functional, and meeting SLAs, confirming that transactions should succeed from a backend perspective.
This is essential for checking that both owned systems and third-party dependencies are performing reliably and working together.
But that’s not the same as knowing transactions do work for your customer.
Test the digital experience from the driver’s seat
Frontends add complexity: Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), file uploads, page rendering, and third-party blockers including ID verification and SMS providers, to name a few.
STM takes your car for a test drive. It simulates transactions as a customer would experience them — on real ISP connections, using checkpoints near end-users.
It simulates full user flows (such as login with MFA, fund transfers, or loan approvals) in real browsers or web apps, giving you outside-in validation that your digital experience works.
When used together, these two monitoring types:
- Identify and resolve both backend and frontend issues before they become incidents.
- Provide evidence for SLA compliance and audit-ready reporting.
- Accelerate troubleshooting by pinpointing where a transaction failed.
- Build confidence in resilience across the organization, from developers to executive leaders.
Let’s explore how that applies to four key retail banking user flows.
Four retail banking use cases for STM
Here’s how a combined monitoring approach safeguards your most critical user transactions:
Payments: Proving every transfer works end-to-end
Regulators are tightening oversight of instant payment systems like FPS, UPI, and PayNow. Meeting uptime SLAs isn’t enough — you need to provide proof that transfers succeed 24x7.
STM proactively catches issues like missed callbacks, MFA timeouts, or third-party lags, helping you detect and resolve problems before they have an impact. This not only helps you assure compliance, but also protect customer trust that every transfer clears.
Lending: Keeping applications moving
Loan applications touch multiple APIs and third-party services. Even if each dependency responds, flows can still fail with broken validations or missing decision outputs.
STM replays full applications to ensure approvals complete seamlessly, delivering faster decisions, fewer abandoned applications, and resilience — even as cloud and third-party dependencies multiply.
Onboarding & KYC: Ensuring smooth account creation
Drop-offs at onboarding are one of retail banking’s biggest revenue leaks.
Nine in 10 banks in Singapore, for instance, have lost clients in the past year due to onboarding delays and inefficiencies. Customers expect seamless signups, while regulators demand continuous reliability of KYC/AML processes.
STM exposes blockers API checks alone can’t catch (failed uploads, CAPTCHA errors, or regional restrictions) helping banks improve conversion rates and pass audits with confidence.
OTP delivery: Proving notifications arrive
In APAC, where logins and payments often depend on OTPs, regulators see timely SMS and email delivery as critical to both security and resilience.
STM simulates OTP flows and validates that customers actually receive their codes within SLA (e.g., under 30 seconds). This eliminates the blind spot between backend validation and real-world digital experience.
Meet expectations for reliability and resilience
Customers expect transactions to succeed instantly, every time. And regulators expect oversight of resilience and third-party risk, especially around payments. For APAC retail banks, meeting these expectations is key to staying competitive, compliant, and trusted.
API monitoring keeps the backend running; Synthetic Transaction Monitoring ensures the digital experience works as expected.
Combined, they take you from checking uptime to protecting end-to-end reliability — which is what truly matters for your customers, regulators, and business.
Want to prove resilience under real-world conditions? Explore Uptrends for retail banks.