How Test Automation Helps Global Banks Achieve Speed and Agility

Banks per se face challenges due to technological changes, evolving regulations, and customer preferences. At the same time, nimbler competitors (tech titans, fintechs, and neo banks) with built-in agility are delivering better customer satisfaction. In a rapidly changing business environment, banks need to respond faster with a better portfolio of products and quick delivery of services. Agility can help incumbent banks respond better to the challenges, overcome some of the shortcomings of their legacy systems, foster speed-to-market, and derive higher customer satisfaction.

Banks view the digitization of their processes as a competitive advantage and deliver quality at scale and speed. Consequently, developing, testing, and deploying banking applications have undergone a sea change. They have moved away from issue-based and reactive testing at the end of the development cycle to embedding quality throughout the SDLC. For global banks, this means implementing a holistic quality engineering solution underpinned by software QA automation.

How Does Test Automation Help Global Banks?

Enterprise intelligent automation allows banks to enable an agile culture for application development. It is a far cry from performing manual testing that impedes speed to market, causes redundant testing, and wastes time, effort, and money. Test automation services can create a unified testing module within the SDLC to deliver high-quality applications quickly and cost-effectively. By embracing quality engineering, banks can plan for automating every aspect of the testing pipeline. This includes redesigning the existing testing solution and moving to a process-driven application model.

Further, to avoid the need to create test cases manually, a quality engineering approach lets testers perform low-code automation using visual application models. Thus, a test designer belonging to an automation testing company can update the visual model with changes and then generate updated automated scripts. For banks embracing quality engineering, it is important to improve three indicators, as mentioned below:

Time to market: With automated testing services, the unified testing model can help banks reduce their testing cycle significantly. Further, by automating the core banking systems, banks can reduce the time for regression testing, thereby accelerating the time to market. It enables them to launch new products or services quickly.

Automation: Intelligent automation services can perform routine and repetitive testing and significantly reduce the number of resources. These can then be deployed for more value-added jobs elsewhere.

Quality: Test automation services can enhance the quality of testing, reduce defects, and increase productivity by a significant margin. The test services can run repetitive tests without stopping and identify vulnerabilities in the process. These allow banks to redeploy resources in core areas to support demand from clients (both business and retail customers).

The Role of Quality Engineering (QE) in Banks

Global banks have embraced quality engineering to drive digital transformation. They are setting new benchmarks for delivering superior customer service and a rich product portfolio. The benefits of incorporating quality engineering into banking processes include:

Reliable customer service: Accelerated digital transformation programs cannot be driven by traditional quality assurance methods. Banks need to conduct software testing alongside development, à la Agile and DevOps. This shift has been brought about through quality engineering solutions. QE teams work in tandem with developers and operations to enable quicker processing and release of applications. This allows QE teams to succeed over traditional QA methods and provide a reliable service to the customers.

Stability and security: Global banks need the security and stability of their applications, as any error could prove costly and irreparable. Quality engineering-driven QA automation services can help banks mitigate such issues. Before deploying any application, they can mimic end-users and draw insights from their interactions with the application. This can help banks run better iterations on their products and deliver improved customer experiences. By embracing a shift-left testing approach, QE teams can bring about a substantial cost advantage and superior agility for product delivery. By embracing QE, banks can deliver quality at speed, which is what customers today value most.

Enhanced quality: Quality engineering allows global banks to detect and fix any glitches in the banking applications or systems before they are deployed for customer use. It allows banks to roll out products or services at scale and speed and keep competition at bay.

Conclusion

Global banks with legacy systems face a plethora of challenges, including competition from nimble fintechs and neobanks. As customers have gotten used to interacting with banks using a plethora of touchpoints (smartphones, digital wallets, cards, computers, and others), their appetite for quick, reliable, and secure services has increased significantly. By embracing quality engineering and automation testing services, they can drive innovation and offer an outstanding customer experience. Moreover, quality engineering is the fastest way to foster digital transformation for banks, which they need to build trust and credibility.

Stark is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies. I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality that yields strong results