Growth in Banking & Financial Applications: Increased Demand of QA

In today’s era, the BFSI industry has been revolutionized by the latest trends and digital initiatives like Mobile wallets, P2P Transfers, Ping pay, Omni Channel banking has digitally transformed the world. The banking domain involves intricate functionalities and a functional framework spread across Corporate banking, Centralized banking, Cards, and payment gateways.

For an application to succeed, there are various factors involved like, ease of access, performance, smooth and secure support. The financial applications possess multi-tier functionality to cater for thousands of concurrent user sessions. Such applications are integrated with complex business workflows, Bill pay utility as they involve Real-time transactions at a very high rate.  Therefore, the transaction processor involves millions of transactions per second making it a complex system.

Testing of banking and financial applications becomes crucial in order to evaluate their reliability and proficiency. Growing customer expectations have led to the increasingly complex financial services that have made testing an important affair.

Due to the involvement of complex functionalities in banking and financial applications, using one or two software testing techniques is not enough. Such applications require an end to end testing methodology involving various software testing techniques to accomplish the following goals.

• To ensure the functional and security aspects of the application

• To ensure data integrity and performance of the application

• To deliver the best user experience

• To  maximize test coverage of all banking workflows and business requirements

Challenges faced by the BFSI Industry:

1. Multi-Channel approach: Everyone wants to make use of banking services anytime and anywhere that led to the origin of digital banks i.e. banks without branches. Providing users with complete workflow or end to end functionality of a bank on the front-end of the mobile devices becomes a challenging task.

2. A plethora of devices: Wide range of devices are available having different platforms, operating systems, screen resolution, etc. So, testing of applications becomes challenging as proper attention is to be given to make sure that the application provides a consistent user experience across different networks and devices.

3. Security: Handling data in financial and banking applications is difficult because of its nature. Security testing becomes a challenge due to the large variety of operating systems, devices and networks. A tester has to ensure that the application sticks to security standards across all networks, platforms, operating systems.

4. Time-to-Market: Due to the ever-growing demand for banking or financial services, the service providers are in hurry to add the latest features and release their applications faster that leads to reduced testing hours for the testing teams due to time limitations. This can have security consequences and also affects customers’ trust.

5. Performance: Performance related issues can have a major impact on banking and finance-related applications. The performance failures in such applications can cause serious effects. The transactions frequency must be monitored frequently while Load tests must be regularly performed to ensure its support for multiple transactions at a given time.

How can we overcome these challenges?

i) Making use of a clearly defined testing methodology

ii) Performing end-to-end testing considering all the workflows and requirements

iii) Testing the performance, security, and whole functionality of the application

iv) Performing some additional testing for the data integrity, UI, UX, and support for concurrent users

Implementing all the above practices requires large investments in terms of both efforts and expenses. Product’s scalability gets increased with performance testing. A good partner can help the businesses save money and time along with ensuring business protection and continuity. Our skilled and dedicated pool of resources is an expert in testing banking and financial applications. Teams can be extended as per the project requirements.