Banks and other financial institutions have been facing deep disruption in the form of new regulatory pressures and evolving market demands. They are reconsidering their established processes, priorities, and products, in order to lay the foundations for future success.
Contents
- Major Trends Driving Change in the Banking Sector
- The significance of Software Testing in Banking
- Conclusion
As digital transformation is in full swing, software is regarded as the key to success. Most of the banks have started to hire a fully-fledged team of software developers. The challenge lies in creating high-quality and innovative customer experiences at the speed with which the market is moving, while remaining submissive with shifting market guidelines.
Major Trends Driving Change in the Banking Sector
The banking industry has changed tremendously in recent years, and there are three major trends that have acted as a facilitator.
1. Growing Customer Expectations
The explosion of digitalization and connected devices has made it obvious for customers to expect easy and anytime/anywhere services from financial institutions. In the economic world, this translate into global expectations for fast and hassle-free transactions, whether they are making payments or looking for statements.
2. Digital Disruption
To meet customer expectations, organizations are finding new ways to offer digital services to customers and to provide greater value. Banks have come up with new technologies such as digital wallets, 100% connectivity with wearables for fraud alerts, and much more. Also, new advancements such as blockchains and distributed databases have started to impact on the way banks and financial institutions are doing business these days.
3. Increasing Competition
Today’s market is full of competitors and potential partners hoping to get into the digital wave in the form of new products or brand-new startups that are building modern financial services. Some are directly competitive, while others might be imminent in only a specific part of the institution’s capabilities.
The significance of Software Testing in Banking
A newly set-up digital bank has its own share of technological / business challenges to handle. Software testing has been contributing to digital banking immensely. Some of the advantages are listed below.
User Experience
A digital bank needs to offer an online interface and interaction that can imitate and enhance the interaction of a conversation with a person. The objective should be to push the whole interaction out to the customer and to put them in control. Through a complete workflow / UI testing, one can ensure that the functional navigation is instinctive and simple to use.
Application Performance
Days such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday create a spike in online traffic; more so across the payment gateways. Websites can have performance failures due to heavy traffic and can have a serious effect on the customers. It has become essential that the banking applications are able to handle peak volumes of the payment transaction, etc., in high traffic as well. Application performance testing can, therefore, help in checking the estimated load that the application can withstand.
Transactional Security
Banking portals, by their very nature, are the main targets for fraudulent activities such as hacking. Penetration testing and vulnerability scanners can expose significant system vulnerabilities. It also helps in making the application compliant to international security standards, such as PCI DSS.
Multiple Interfaces
The external feed possesses the main challenge, for which it has to be tested thoroughly. Imitating real-time environment and testing in such conditions can really be a daunting task. To solve some of the challenges in interface testing, choosing the right emulators to replicate a real-time testing environment is really necessary.
Failover and Recovery
The ruggedness of the Failover and Recovery systems do not help in gaining the confidence of the customers or encourage them to transact online. Losing out on an alluring deal or money getting stuck in transit is a major put off and can lead to customer alienation. Testing for accessibility and business continuity is imperative.
The team at TestingXperts specializes in providing testing solutions to the banking and financial services industry. TestingXperts has been working with the largest banks and various other financial organizations, across geographies, to help them embark on their digital journey.
Our intelligent platform ‘Tx-Automate’ augments our independent testing services and addresses gaps in commercial tools to improve test authoring and execution productivity by 25% and early defect detection by 40%.
