Introduction
Banking applications are one of the critical customer channels for financial organizations, and app users expect their online banking services to be just as smooth and easy as their in-person banking experiences. As customers use banking services around the clock, it has become imperative for BFSI companies to offer a seamless customer experience. Financial organizations rely on their QA teams to enhance and update their banking services to retain customers. The IT spending in the BFSI sector is expected to grow steadily and reach USD 715 billion in 2025. This shows the increasing interest of banking enterprises in IT solutions, like end-to-end testing and test automation, to improve the performance of their apps and banking solutions.
This article highlights the importance of end-to-end testing in the BFSI industry, and the challenges faced by banking companies while implementing end-to-end testing.
Role of End-to-End Testing in the Development of Banking Solutions
Since the BFSI industry is undergoing a lot of changes due to digital transformation and technological advancements, banking organizations have a significant dependence on technology-enabled products to ensure a great customer experience. To deliver safe and secure transactions, companies are focusing on effective testing methods for all activities performed by banking software/apps. End-to-end testing is one of the software testing methods in financial services used to run banking apps smoothly without any errors. With end-to-end testing, banking enterprises can monitor and test all operations involved in an application.
Some of the significant factors that make end-to-end testing necessary for banking solutions include:
1. Regulation and Business Requirements
In order to operate efficiently in the banking industry, companies need to maintain business transparency and follow certain rules set by regulators. End-to-end testing can help banking companies ensure that all banking solutions abide by regulatory compliance terms and conditions.
2. Digital Transformation
With the emergence of smartphones, tablets, and IoT-based devices, the financial industry is witnessing a massive change in the digitalization of banking and digital payment methods. With the introduction of automation in financial services, end-to-end monitoring and testing are required to ensure that paperless transactions through banking solutions are easy and error-free.
3. Better Customer Experience
Nowadays, customer experience is at the heart of any business. In the BFSI industry, users demand apps with good usability, better user interface, and stable performance at peak loads. With end-to-end performance testing and automation in the banking industry, enterprises building banking applications can deliver a great user experience and improved performance.
4. Security and Privacy
With cyber-attacks being common, the topmost priority of financial organizations is to protect customers’ important data and ensure safe transactions. End-to-end testing can enable these companies to perform vigorous security testing during all stages of application development.
HeadSpin's Role in End-to-End Monitoring and Testing of BFSI Applications
The testing of BFSI apps is critical, as they are directly connected to users and involve millions of financial transactions. HeadSpin supports financial organizations worldwide with its load, performance, security, usability, and functional testing capabilities to deliver bug-free, fully functional, and high-performing apps.
Here are the major features of HeadSpin’s end-to-end testing that helps banking and financial companies build secure, high-performing applications.
1. CI/CD Integration to Automate the Testing of New Builds
The HeadSpin Platform supports all open test frameworks. This means that, with a HeadSpin plugin, banking enterprises can integrate the test session with the CI/CD pipeline and automate testing processes effectively. This feature also enables viewing the performance of all devices used during build and end-of-build.
2. Performance and ML Module for Experience Insights
The HeadSpin Platform, powered by the performance and ML module, supports banking and financial companies in gathering insights about their applications’ performance and user experience. Companies can measure and analyze packet-level network data and device KPIs through ML models to provide actionable insights. Banking companies can use insights, such as issue cards, time series, session videos, and packet-level details, provided by HeadSpin’s automated software testing platform to enhance the performance and user experience of their applications.
3. Regression Intelligence
With HeadSpin’s Regression Intelligence, BFSI companies can thoroughly perform regression testing of mobile and browser apps to proactively detect and resolve performance, functionality, and localization issues. They can also compare build over build, location over location, network over network, and device over device performances of their apps throughout the development process. These in-depth analyses enable BFSI enterprises to understand performance & UX trends across various factors, including geography and network providers. It also helps BFSI companies get insights into 3rd party API and SDK behavior and performance impacting UX to make proactive course corrections, ultimately enabling them in perfecting digital experiences for their customers.
4. Data Visualization Dashboards and Replica DB
HeadSpin’s data visualization enables companies in the BFSI industry to use data collected across various test sessions throughout the development cycle and infer experience and performance insights from the data to improve their applications’ performance. The Replica DB feature will help companies to export test session data from the HeadSpin Platform to their own dashboard solutions or to their data lakes. Organizations can use HeadSpin’s data visualization dashboards to configure alerts and watchers to monitor KPIs continuously.
5. Biometric SDK
HeadSpin enables banking organizations to test and capture user experience that involves biometric authentication with biometric SDK. Common banking features, like fingerprint and facial recognition, can be tested with HeadSpin’s biometric SDK to improve customer experiences.
See: How Intelligent Automation is Disrupting the Banking Industry
Major Challenges in Implementing End-to-End Testing in the BFSI Industry
With ever-changing and cutting-edge technologies, the banking industry has been a forerunner in adapting and scaling up to new technological changes. However, BFSI enterprises face a lot of challenges in implementing new technologies, like end-to-end testing.
1. Maintaining Effective Data Transfer During System Migration
Transferring data is a big challenge to banking organizations when migrating from the old system to the new system, as these data are very sensitive and important for their clients. In this stage, implementing end-to-end testing will complicate the whole testing environment.
2. Providing Real-time Updates
With a lot of devices and OS available in the market, it is necessary for testing teams of financial companies to verify the stability of their banking apps and provide real-time updates for their app users. However, this is a big challenge for banking companies, as they have to track and monitor their apps 24*7 to identify and solve various real-time issues.
3. Meeting Security Requirements While Testing
A major challenge BFSI organizations face is testing their apps that meet security requirements. Banking enterprises are finding it challenging to deploy a secured solution to test their apps as they deal with sensitive and crucial data.
4. Maintaining Operational Consistency Across Devices and Systems
Banking apps require to operate consistently across different operating systems, browsers, and devices. Owing to the fragmentation in OS, browsers, and devices, banking enterprises find it difficult to deliver error-free experiences to their customers. With many versions of iOS and Android devices available in the market, it has been a challenge for BFSI companies to upgrade their apps to support their respective versions.
Why is HeadSpin Crucial for BFSI Companies to Overcome These Challenges?
HeadSpin’s testing solution for the BFSI industry can support banking organizations to accelerate and improve their application development process. Let’s see how HeadSpin’s solution can help financial institutions implement end-to-end testing and improve the overall performance of their applications.
1. Multiple Deployment Models Offered by HeadSpin
The data transfer challenge faced by financial companies during system migration is a serious one, as it can cripple companies’ operational efficiency. With HeadSpin’s multiple deployment models, such as on-prem, cloud (single tenant), cloud (multi-tenant), and create your own lab, enterprises can test and store their test data on the cloud. This feature will help banking companies securely store their test data and analysis, even while shifting to new systems.
2. Cross-device Performance Monitoring
As mentioned earlier in the challenges, with a lot of devices and OS available in the market, it is a big challenge for banking companies to test their solutions to provide real-time updates. Using the HeadSpin Platform, BFSI companies can test their solutions’ performance across different devices and platforms, such as mobile applications, desktops, browsers, etc.
3. Secured Testing Platform
The HeadSpin Platform is a SOC 2-compliant testing platform. HeadSpin regularly engages a third-party security validator to perform a security assessment on the Headspin network and is certified in passive reconnaissance, automated vulnerability scanning, and manual testing. With the secured HeadSpin Platform, banking organizations can test their applications without the fear of data theft.
4. Global Testing
With HeadSpin’s global device infrastructure, banking companies can remotely perform end-to-end testing on real devices in 50+ locations. This feature will help BFSI enterprises to overcome the challenge of maintaining operational consistency across devices and systems.
How HeadSpin’s End-to-End Testing Supported Global BFSI Companies?
Here are two examples of how the HeadSpin Platform helped banking and financial companies worldwide to test and develop their applications effectively.
Case Study 1
One of the largest banking and financial service providers in India was searching for a solution to test end-to-end use cases for various banking services, like making payments, transaction history, and buying products. The user journeys of the company’s banking services were very complex. HeadSpin’s capabilities of automation helped the company in reducing the efforts required for testing such user journeys. With HeadSpin’s end-to-end automation, the company reduced the time spent on testing and improved customer engagement for offers provided through their app.
Case Study 2
A leading payments technology company working to enable consumers, businesses, banks, and governments to use digital currency wanted a solution to perform end-to-end pre-release testing and monitoring. HeadSpin deployed 12 dedicated Android and iOS devices on Headspin hosted cloud across Hong Kong, India, UAE, and the US to enable the company to do end-to-end pre-release testing and monitoring. The company used Appium for end-to-end automation and was impressed with HeadSpin’s Appium experience. With the HeadSpin Platform, the company was able to see how their app was performing, test, and retrieve data throughout the development cycle.
Conclusion
With digital transformation playing an important role in the banking industry, all banking channels continue to undergo rapid technological changes. In the BFSI industry, it is important to develop high-performing apps, as they require to serve millions of transactions. Moreover, the need for effective end-to-end testing has also increased among banking solutions to deliver customer-centric products.
With HeadSpin’s BFSI testing solution, banking and financial organizations can increase their total addressable market (TAM) by delivering the best customer experience through various digital channels. By choosing the best tool for end-to-end testing, HeadSpin, global BFSI companies were able to improve their test coverage by up to 30%, meet the highest security standard norms, and execute tests 15% faster.
FAQs
Q1. What are the five main aspects of banking apps that are tested using end-to-end testing?
Ans: Data integrity, concurrency, user experience, security, and functional aspects.
Q2. What are the important stages involved in the testing of banking applications?
Ans: Requirement gathering, requirement review, business scenario preparations, functional testing, database testing, security testing, and user acceptance.
Q3. What is comparative usability testing?
Ans: Comparative usability testing is a comparison-based testing method to verify the ease of usability of one app compared to another. The main reason for BFSI companies to use this method is to provide the best user experience for their users.
Q4. What are the two types of end-to-end testing?
Ans:
Horizontal end-to-end testing: It is a testing method that checks each workflow or transaction of each application from the beginning to the end to ensure that each related process is error-free.
Vertical end-to-end testing: It is a method that tests each layer of a single application’s architecture from top to bottom.
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