The banking landscape has seen so much change over the years. About twenty years ago, carrying out all your banking requirements from your home was a utopian thought.
Yet, here we are at the end of 2024, discussing how to improve that service. Consider in-app purchases. In its “State of Consumer Digital Payments in 2024” report, McKinsey highlights that in the US, in-app purchases through digital payments reached 60%.
With the numbers favoring mobile usage, application stability is vital. Think about the frustration a user would experience if his banking app crashed or experienced an outage during an important transaction.
So, how do you ensure app stability? Through targeted testing to improve performance.
Testing and Quality Assurance
Integration Testing
Banking apps have modules like user authentication, transaction process, and account management. These modules must work together seamlessly.
Like when a customer initiates a fund transfer, the system should authenticate the user, verify account balances, process the transaction, and update records accordingly.
Failure could lead to issues like failed transactions or incorrect account information, jeopardizing app stability. Integration testing ensures these interconnected modules function well together, maintaining the application's reliability.
Regression Testing
Banks handle sensitive data, so their security needs constant upkeep. Additionally, user requirements are always changing; banking apps introduce new features to meet them.
Changes to code can have a ripple effect impacting existing functionalities - a user set up a recurring payment, but a recent update disrupted this feature, making the app unstable and delaying his payment.
Regression testing ensures this doesn’t happen. Done manually, this task is tedious, so automating it will be beneficial.
Security Testing
Security breaches can introduce malware into the app, attackers can tamper with code, or the app can simply shut down after detecting a breach.
Security testing must be a vital part of your testing process. Ensure your app's two-factor authentication systems function well and adhere to the latest regulatory requirements.
Performance Testing
Performance testing is critical in ensuring banking apps function properly. There are many types of performance tests:
- Load Testing: The threat of banking app crashes is most common during peak usage times, like during a sale or festive season. Due to an increase in the number of users, the app can experience a load in basic functionalities like payments or account management. Load testing helps analyze how well an app functions/performs under these expected high-traffic conditions.
- Scalability Testing: Banking apps must be able to scale to meet increasing requirements, such as during the heightened activity during stock market opening and closing periods. Stress testing helps check how well the app performs under increased workload.
- Latency Testing: Consider the stock market example again. During a market surge, users expect transactions to be processed immediately. Latency tests measure the time a financial app takes to process requests.
Mobile app testing will help ensure your application is stable, but what can you do to ensure sustained stability?
Streamlining Infrastructure and DevOps Integration
The right infrastructure and DevOps practices ensure high performance and stability. Infrastructure that dynamically adapts to shifting demands, combined with streamlined CI/CD pipelines, ensures your BFSI app has no service disruptions.
Scalable Infrastructure
Cloud-based architectures let you scale computing power, storage, and network capacity. When user traffic spikes—like during a payroll day or an unexpected transaction surge—your backend can scale up to maintain responsiveness, then scale down to optimize costs when demand subsides.
- Microservices for scaling: Since microservice architecture divides the app into smaller, independent services, scaling becomes much more possible. For example, during peak financial times, a microservice architecture lets you scale certain services like payments without changing the entire system.
Breaking down monolithic architectures into microservices enables stability in that if one service fails, the entire application doesn’t collapse. The system is more resilient.
Apart from implementing the right infrastructure, taking advantage of DevOps practices can help maintain stability.
Real-Time Performance and Security Monitoring
With real-time monitoring, banks can track latency, error rates, resource utilization, and user behavior to detect early warning signs of instability. Moreover, it can also help them detect fraudulent transactions. Cyber security will help improve app security.
Once the infrastructure and delivery pipelines are set, ensuring users have a consistent experience on every device and network type is vital.
Ensuring Cross-Device and Multi-Platform Performance
BFSI customers interact with applications on smartphones, tablets, desktops, and also wearables. Stability means delivering a smooth, responsive interface regardless of device specifications or network conditions.
Real Device Testing
To ensure this, testing on real devices is vital. You cannot get accurate results from simulators, especially when testing battery drain or the camera for face ID login or biometric authentication.
Code Optimization
By developing and maintaining a single codebase— through frameworks like Flutter or React Native—developers can reduce complexity and cuts down on overall development time. As a result, developers can focus on thorough cross-platform testing teams and addressing any functional and stability issues that arise. Lately, this approach has been enabling developers to release more stable apps.
Update Libraries and Plugins
Outdated plugins or libraries will cause compatibility issues and lead to app instability. Ensure all libraries and plugins are up-to-date and compatible with the latest iOS and Android versions.
These steps help ensure that regardless of the device or platform, your BFSI app feels consistently reliable. Yet, even these measures benefit from a culture of continuous improvement and long-term best practices.
Embedding Best Practices for Long-Term Stability
Clear Incident Protocols
Predefine roles, escalation paths, and communication strategies for outages or slowdowns. These protocols minimize downtime and reassure users that you’re in control, even during unexpected incidents.
Improvements With Data
Use performance metrics and user behavior analytics to guide future improvements. For instance, if mobile usage spikes in a particular region due to a scale, focus on optimizing load times for that section.
Continuous Upskill
Regular workshops and training sessions keep your tech teams updated on the latest tools, frameworks, and techniques. Continuous learning ensures everyone is equipped to maintain and enhance stability.
Collaboration
Stability is not solely an engineering concern. Product managers, UX designers, and support teams should collaborate closely. Feedback from frontline customer service teams, for example, can reveal unexpected performance issues and suggest user-focused enhancements.
Customer-Centric Iteration
Incorporate user feedback loops. Engaging with customers, understanding their pain points, and refining features based on their needs ensures that stability measures remain aligned with real-world use cases.
Conclusion
Ensuring long-term app stability involves thorough mobile app testing, adaptable infrastructure, and good cross-device functionality. Another significant way to ensure app stability is to test on real devices.
HeadSpin gives you access to real, SIM-enabled devices to conduct your tests. This allows you to test in real-world environments and ensure app stability.
Learn more about how HeadSpin can help.
FAQs
Q1. How do predictive analytics tools help stabilize performance before issues arise?
Ans: Predictive analytics identify usage patterns and resource constraints early, enabling proactive measures—such as scaling resources or optimizing code—before performance dips impact users.
Q2. How do periodic refreshes of third-party integrations affect stability?
Ans: Regularly updating external services ensures compatibility, reduces the risk of deprecated APIs causing errors, and keeps the user experience consistent and secure.
Q3. What role does legacy infrastructure play in impacting app stability?
Ans: BFSI organizations may operate with modern and legacy systems. Integrating with outdated core banking software can introduce latency and reliability challenges. Addressing these might involve gradual modernization, using APIs to bridge systems, and carefully planning migrations to prevent disruptions.
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