By: Milind Prabhu, Delivery Head – Testing Services, Banking & Financial Services, North Americas

As banking applications grow more complex and interconnected, lenders need to rely on robust, automated testing to ensure quality and integrity of financial services.

Today’s financial applications, driven by the latest technologies, enable banks to provide a wide range of services, fostering increased customer satisfaction. They allow seamless transactions per second, large-scale integration, robust auditing and reporting, effective data storage, and proactive incident management. These applications provide a range of functionalities spanning cards, diverse payment gateways, ATMs and mobile devices​, using dynamic content, helping you quickly promote new products and services.

These new age applications need to constantly deliver unmatched quality, performance, ease of access, and superior user experience, to help you sustain competitive advantage. Moreover, banking applications directly handle confidential data that needs protection against cyber threats and other financial fraud. Which is why, the importance of robust, end-to-end application testing cannot be overstated.

On the one hand, comprehensive testing helps minimize software defects, enabling you to swiftly roll out market-ready applications that support your dynamic business strategies. On the other hand, it plays a vital role in enabling you to comply with the stringent data standards mandated by global regulators.

Driving quality and performance with robust testing
By implementing well thought through quality assurance (QA) initiatives, you will be able to deliver services and products that effectively meet customer needs and preferences. Optimized QA processes and well planned test management programs help in reducing post-production defects. With mature testing tools and processes, you can increase the reliability of your core systems, while significantly reducing costs with the help of automation.

Given the increased complexity and interconnectedness of your applications, you require an end-to-end testing methodology, encompassing different software testing techniques. These include continuous testing, omni-channel testing, customer experience testing, cyber security testing, mobile app testing, as well as load testing and stress testing.

Such a comprehensive approach will ensure complete coverage of all your workflows and business requirements, along with the functional and security aspects of your applications. You will thus be well positioned to design and deliver robust applications faster, while also ensuring they help you address operational risk effectively.

Overcoming challenges in testing
While testing is indispensable for the smooth and hassle-free running of financial applications, it poses several challenges. Let us look at a few of them:

​Complexity: The banking application landscape is complex and includes legacy systems, calling for constant updates and upgrades in keeping with the frequently changing market and regulatory requirements. You will need to create and run about 200 test scripts for each release of a typical web or mobile application, making it a highly complicated exercise.
Moreover, with increased pressure to reduce the time to market of your applications, you may be tempted to allot less time for testing, thus increasing the risks to quality.

Heterogeneous testing environment: Your QA teams must test a huge number of devices, operating systems (OS) or browser combinations such as internet Explorer on Windows 8 or Surface, and Safari on an iPhone7. Even if you were to test 15 such combinations, you will require about 380 tester days to complete manual testing of a typical application release.

Additionally, as ‘wearable banking’ gains ground, you will need to test your banking apps on popular wearables such as Google Glass and Apple Watch, to cater to increasingly digitally-savvy consumers. Your QA teams will eventually face growing challenges while trying to scale up manual testing processes. An ever-growing number of payment devices and the Internet of Things (IoT) will only add to these challenges.

Regression testing and data security: One of the key challenges in testing is performing cost effective regression testing over an application’s lifecycle. You must also ensure testing covers system integration, and your test data usage is in compliance with data confidentiality norms.

In order to tackle these challenges effectively, you must implement an effective test suite, test environment, and establish robust test data management. By using sophisticated test data management tools, you can simplify data identification, while ensuring data integrity through information masking.

One of the best ways to deliver high performance financial applications and services is to embrace test automation. You can perform automated functional tests frequently and repeatedly, ensuring greater speed and accuracy, and also identifying most of the errors earlier in the development cycle.

If you are looking to realize greater value from automation, develop a long term testing framework and roadmap, and most importantly, centralize the management of your testing service providers, tools and resources.

In conclusion, if you want to expedite the launch of customer-centric business applications while ensuring zero glitches at ‘go live’, you must establish superior QA initiatives. Comprehensive testing before rolling out new products and services will go a long way in ensuring your customers obtain a superior banking experience, helping you maintain an edge over your peers.

Drive testing excellence with L&T Infotech
Backed by strong domain and technology expertise, L&T Infotech serves as a ‘quality enabler’, offering Assurance Services to help you achieve consistent quality across your run,​ change and transformation initiatives. Aligned to business-driven outcomes, our integrated assurance services span the entire spectrum of banking and financial services, including capital markets and investment, corporate and retail, wealth management, cards and treasury segments.

Our Mosaic^TM Assurance Platform offers a data rule engine, and enables ‘One Click’ Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based automation, smart test design, and enterprise test data and environment management. It also offers intelligent end-to-end traceability, and predictive reporting and analysis.

Let’s get talking to understand how we can help you achieve testing excellence.