Banking

3 Major Trends Driving Change in the Banking Sector

admin — Mon, 30 Oct 2017 08:29:16 +0000

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 1. Major Trends Driving Change in the Banking Sector 2. The significance of Software Testing in Banking 3. 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.

Conclusion

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%.

The post 3 Major Trends Driving Change in the Banking Sector first appeared on TestingXperts.

Testing Strategies to Overcome Digital Disruption in the Banking Sector

admin — Mon, 17 Jul 2017 09:23:54 +0000

Digital disruption has been occurring at every level in the banking sector lately. From newer technology to high competition to intensified customer expectations, the banking industry has become increasingly vulnerable. Digital technology, despite its omnipresence, is beginning to penetrate industries.

Contents 1. Digital Disruption and Banking Sector 2. Testing Strategies to Overcome Digital Disruption in the Banking Sector 2.1. Omni-Channel Testing 2.2 Continuous Testing 2.3 Customer Experience Testing 2.4 Security Testing 2.5 Big Data Testing 3. Conclusion

Digital Disruption and Banking Sector

Banks are finding innovative ways to evade the impending risks associated with digital banking. The efficient way to understand and successfully bring the organization from traditional banking to digital banking is by adopting an Omni-Channel approach. Omni-channel is an approach to customer service where all the channels are closely integrated, keeping the customer as the priority.

As customers continue to modify their channel usage patterns, banks need to emphasize on delivering a flawless customer experience across various touch points. More than just a saying, Omni-channel banking is an outlook to take end product on an advanced note by gaining insights from consumers’ behavior, channels, and preferences.

These days customers are more advanced and tech-savvy, and to cater to their explicit needs, offering a unique banking experience is essential. Banks need to understand their unstated needs as well as the likes of clients. From exploring new services, checking balance, opening an account, conducting transactions, loans, credits, wealth management, customer support, delivering an Omni-channel experience has become the key to success in this competitive world.

So how does a banking organization survive in the face of digital disruption? Though there are no secret sauces or magic wands, there are just simple testing strategies that can help banking organizations prepare for the unavoidable change on the horizon. Some of the testing strategies are given below:

Testing Strategies to Overcome Digital Disruption in the Banking Sector

Omni-Channel Testing

If a service offering has to be made available to any client anytime, anyplace in the banking sector, it should be available using multiple devices with a single procedure across multiple devices. Omni-Channel testing helps to ensure performance across all channels.

Continuous Testing

Continuous testing in the banking sector speeds up the process of continuous integration and delivery. It enables the teams to test early with greater coverage, with removing bottlenecks involved with traditional testing. Continuous testing also promotes continuous monitoring of the development and IT operations team, while achieving the continuous success of Agile teams using DevOps practices.

Customer Experience Testing

Customer experience is the key factor that defines recognition of a product or service as it goes live. It is essential to test a product or service from the customer’s perspective. Unlike traditional testing, customer experience testing can vary from expectations of a product’s success. The success of a product or a service is based on customer expectations and the physical performance and processes.

Security Testing

Technology trends have been playing a huge role in improving digital transformation process in the banking sector; they have also been introducing an environment of threat to the organizations. Due to the increasing number of payment methods using digital technologies, banks have been exposed further to new frauds and cyber-attacks. Security testing is therefore crucial and has great significance banks hold huge volumes of sensitive customer’s data for which they are daily targeted.

Big Data Testing

The ever rising demands related to the cost of delivery, speed, and ease of online transactions is fascinating. Banking applications fascinate customers 24/7 across the globe. This makes it essential to test the huge amount of data for a better ROI, site performance, and conversions.

Conclusion

Becoming a digital bank is not an option these days. In order to effectively respond to the digital consumer, and to be on their mobile device’s ‘front screen’, it necessitates the offering of value-added digital services with a simple user interface.

Banks need to rethink their business processes to realize the real benefits of Digital transformation and should effectively include the above mentioned QA strategies that will help them ensure security, quality and integrity of their products and services. TestingXperts, a renowned independent software testing Services Company, is working with world’s largest banks to help them succeed in their digital initiatives.

The post Testing Strategies to Overcome Digital Disruption in the Banking Sector first appeared on TestingXperts.