Re-Thinking Quality Assurance for The BFSI Industry

With the increasing rate at which cybercrimes and online threats have been impacting the security systems and alternatively the trusts of your customers, it’s essential for the banking, financial services and insurance or BFSI industry to have well established, robust Quality Assurance systems for their businesses.

Moreover, advancing digital technologies have been continuously changing the way industries function across the globe. It has been decades since our digitally equipped customers have made a shift to the technological world. To ensure all business entities deliver quality irrespective of the increased demand for their products or services, you need quality assurance and testing companies to take centre stage. Though this concept stays equally relevant for all existing sectors, it’s a little extra for the BFSI industry. Ideally, your customers want to make the shift to a more digital environment where the need to stand in long queues in local bank branches is reduced. But it’s the fear of losing their hard-earned money over malicious attackers that delays the transition.

Rapid banking digital transformation is loaded with operational benefits for customers. It induces data transparency, removes intermediates in the process, and ensures a fast and secure method to access financial and intellectual data. Additionally, banks can leverage the benefit of lowering the cost of overall operations and enjoy faster transactions.

Why you need digital quality assurance?

With the sudden surge at which smartphones and moreover mobile internet has been made affordable and accessible to the common man, the BFSI industry, in particular, has witnessed a huge wave of digital transformation by accessing hassle-free banking services to all.

Ensuring effective digital assurance services for mobile applications ensures a secure and stable application that your customers trust. Efficiently removing that fear of private data loss when it comes to money can help you as a banking services provider gain customer loyalty across all your service channels. Moreover, you get an enhanced customer experience throughout your application.

What are the challenges faced in digital quality assurance?

With the ever-advancing changes in every other mobile phone launched almost every week, it becomes difficult for banking mobile app service providers to keep up and roll out revisions in their application at that frequent level

The federal regulations keep updating and increased pressure from the marketing teams for product release often results in the reduced testing time available to testers and ultimately risks the quality of the application

Every mobile banking application provider needs to provide real-time updates to their customers to ensure the success of the application that can be a challenging task

All the major BFSI service providing applications become a soft target to hackers because of easy monetary transactions. Hence, it’s important to ensure detailed reporting and maintaining data security throughout the system

Major adopted solutions:

To solve the above-mentioned challenges the following solutions can be used:

Well detailed end to end testing strategies
Visual planning boards, real-time dashboards, etc. to ensure proper planning and execution
Comprehensive UI/UX testing with multiple users
Complete application testing in terms of performance functionality and app security (mentioned in greater detail below)
Agile testing solutions to have an upper edge in the market

11 Reasons Why Banking Systems Need To Leverage Digital Quality Assurance

As technology is evolving, financial institutions are rapidly adopting digital technology and are moving towards digitization. The banking industry now heavily depends on technology and various types of banking applications, which need to perform seamlessly to provide a great experience to the customer.

Since banks deal with crucial customer data and heavy transactions 24/7, it becomes essentially important for banking systems to have the right QA strategy in place. QA testing helps to improve the quality of these banking products before releasing them to the market to ensure the product is defect-free, enabling seamless transactions and deliver a great customer experience. Hence, it is essential for banking systems to leverage QA testing to get high-quality and flawless mobile apps.

1. Multi-tier Architecture Need API Testing

Generally, banking applications follow a multi-tier architecture with three common layers namely presentation, application and database layer. The API layer involved here works similar to the application and hence stays in direct contact with both the data layer and presentation layer and hence require an end to end Quality assurance check. For any updated service in an API to be functional, you need a fully functional backend and middleware systems for support. Businesses require strong API testing services that ensure robust quality assurance processes to validate these updates at all stages

2. Third-party Apps Need Quality Assurance Validation

You need to ensure a full-fledged integration and functional testing system to check for your banking app’s effective integration with other third-party applications like eCommerce, gaming and food delivery apps.

Ineffective quality checks on these stages result in escalated bugs from customers on payment gateways that mostly include transaction failures or delayed notifications. You need strong quality assurance for banking apps for your customers to enjoy a seamless transaction experience across all applications.

3. Downtime/Outages Need Performance Testing

Like any other regular digital systems, banking applications also run-on servers that may face downtime or system outages. The difference lies in the value at stake that can be affected in case this outage is prolonged. Banking application users may face delayed payments or transaction failures in case of server downtime. Therefore, these apps need to go through thorough high-performance testing under various load stimuli to ensure effective functioning under pressure.

4. Increasing Cyber-threats Need Security Testing

The entire BFSI industry deals with a huge amount of confidential customer data that needs to be protected from cyber-attacks. Diligent vulnerability testing or outsourced security testing is necessary to ensure the privacy of these databases is protected at all times.

5. Changing Regulatory Compliances Need To Be Tested

Just like any other business unit, the banking industry too needs to comply with a lot of regulatory compliances and rules. This is an important step towards the final quality check for a business before their service application is released and hence needs to be abided thoroughly. A good software testing consultant would never skip this step and ensure you tick all QA checkboxes to help avoid lawsuits against your business

6. Cloud-based Models Need Cloud Testing Validation

With the onset of cloud computing technology and its impact on all global industries, banks have also picked up the pace and moved a majority of their infrastructure to the cloud. Most BFSI systems opt for a hybrid cloud model where they have the liberty to consider the private cloud for critical and hybrid for mom critical processes and applications. This allows them to leverage the space, speed and performance benefits from the cloud without having to compromise on data privacy.

Hence, banking systems require comprehensive cloud testing services that come with reliable strategies supported by virtual testing environments for cost-effective software testing solutions.

7. Usage Across Devices Require Compatibility Testing

The next and the most essential part of banking apps quality assurance is adequate compatibility testing. There’s a huge population of customers today, who wish to access their banks on fingertips and hence opt for banking mobile apps for all major transactions.

Comprehensive compatibility testing can help ensure these applications function seamlessly across various devices, operating systems and browsers.

8. App Navigation Needs Usability Testing

Quality assurance teams time to time opt for usability testing of banking applications to ensure the app delivers simple, easy and exact navigation throughout the user’s engagement with the app.

9. Need To Ensure Equal Access To Differently-abled Necessitates Accessibility Testing

Banking services are availed by almost every section of society that includes a certain percentage of the differently-abled population as well. It is essential for banking service providers to ensure their applications are accessible to these differently-abled groups. Therefore, it’s a mandate for them to abide by all accessibility regulations and enables easy access to ensure inclusivity and to fulfil societal responsibility.

10. Robust AI Systems Requires AI Testing

Like any other thriving industry, BFSI is also constantly trying to move to the structure of a more AI-based system where they could leverage Artificial intelligence for advanced consumer data analytics, keep a check over fraudulent practices and save on necessary resources. Therefore, AI-based system testing services for banking sector apps becomes a necessary investment for all major BFSI service providers across the globe.

11. Large Chunks Of Data Require Big Data Analytics Testing

Big data has induced transformational changes for a majority of BFSI organisation across the globe. So much so that today, many banks are leveraging the power of big data analytics to derive customer-centric products for their users. It can help you make key business decisions by validating live data collected from various sources. You need to ensure the scalability and security of the application in use while checking your application for big data analytics testing.

Conclusion

The banking and financial companies have been at forefront of the digital transformation age rapidly adapting to the changing technological trends. To effectively extend end-customer engagements most company leaders are shifting to opt for efficient digital quality assurance practices and deliver unmatched customer experience in terms of quality, performance, usability, reliability, security, etc.

Therefore, almost all active stakeholders of the BFSI industry and especially its service providers need to rethink the ideation of quality assurance to their end customers. We at ImpactQA, emphasize every single software required to provide competitive software testing solutions that ultimately increase your cost-effectiveness to a significant per cent.

Schedule a call and optimise your QA processes now!