Today's customers are not willing to accommodate a poorly performing banking, financial or insurance app on their devices. Customers require their banking apps to be stellar in performance; more than 80% of millennials use digital banking and financial services today to leverage services at the ease of their location, time, and convenience. This growing demand has led to many brands competing in the marketplace, urging them to deliver flawless performances of the apps and platforms they offer to the customers.
Therefore to stay competitive, these service providers must rule out the chances of any suboptimal performance and maintain and build apps that allow customers to execute transactions quickly, easily, and glitch-free. Performance testing efficiently addresses these concerns and helps brands deliver optimal experiences to users.
What is performance testing?
Performance testing is a non-functional software testing method that helps determine an app's stability, speed, scalability, and responsiveness under a specific workload. This is one of the critical steps to ensure software quality by evaluating application out[ut, processing speed, data transfer velocity, maximum concurrent users, network bandwidth usage, memory utilization, workload efficiency, and command response times.
For determining the performance of BFSI systems against fluctuating changes, three broad areas of the BFSI applications that performance testing target includes:
1. The digital interface- Web and mobile
Digital technologies range from mobiles to wearable devices today, helping in online banking, bill payments, cash withdrawals, transfers and transactions, and much more. Each of these financial processes has different software requirements and needs rigorous testing.
Check out: The Increasing Need for Performance Testing in Web Apps
2. Banking and financial operations
The diverse applications need to support a massive number of transactions performed simultaneously, like bulk-up loads, financial schedulers, day-end settlements, and many more that have to be performed every day. These must be tested efficiently to ensure they are responsive and reliable at every point.
3. Branchless banking and other financial processes
While users are on the apps, ensuring seamless usability and user-friendliness is necessary to allow efficient operations. As a result, these applications must be tested for overall performance to ensure that online or branchless operations are completed effectively.
Also check: Best Practices for Application Performance Testing
One of the primary criteria is to execute performance testing at the earliest possible stages of the testing cycle to help software teams identify crucial issues in the beginning and continue testing processes along with the entire evolution of the app. For optimal outcomes, the focus must be laid on the bottlenecks and performance glitches to enhance the overall performance of the BFSI systems.
Read: Client-Side Performance Testing - Metrics to Consider
Why do you need to conduct performance testing in the BFSI industry amidst the economic downswing?
As the global recession continues, several organizations are laying off human resources and shutting down different departments that significantly impact the productivity and efficiency of the software testing and QA teams. Moreover, lowered investments in critical testing tools are often leading to poor testing results, thereby deteriorating the software performance and user experience.
Also read: Why is End-to-End Testing Crucial for Banking Apps?
Though cutting down costs is essential, it is important to prioritize the investments for testing efforts to avoid any compromise with app quality.
Optimizing the performance of banking and financial applications is key to ensuring the excellent quality of the software and earning customer loyalty while boosting the revenue of the organizations. For the applications to succeed, secure and seamless support for transactions, ease of access, and performance. Apps should meet the performance and scalability criteria to easily attain business goals.
Check: 5 Tips for Testing Mobile Banking Apps
Identifying performance bottlenecks
Performance testing helps identify critical performance issues and determine whether the app satisfies performance requirements. As a result, companies focus immensely on testing the apps to help improve the overall performance and user experience.
Enhancing performance for customer trust
Poor app performance erodes trust. Though convenience and innovation are critical, consumer trust is absolutely non-negotiable. Consumers need to rely on banks and financial institutions for the safety and privacy of sensitive data, monetary assets, and investments and for securely executing the processes. Additionally, a significant slowdown or other performance glitches during an online process, banking, or insurance transaction can undermine trust and lead to customer churn.
Also check: Challenges in Performance Testing on Mobile Devices
Improving customer loyalty
Poor app performances cost brands their reputation and hinder brand experiences for customers. Efficient performance testing driven by advanced AI technologies helps improve performance by monitoring critical performance indicators, offering solutions to enhance the processes and ensure optimal app performance to win customer loyalty.
Cost efficiencies
Performance lows can significantly affect customer experiences, ultimately leading to decreased revenue for brands. For example, a system that processes financial transactions quickly but utilizes 100% of server resources is highly likely to fail. Whenever the server reports a surge in user requests, the system can crash due to excessive load, leading to higher maintenance and repair costs.
Read: Important Uses of Mobile App Performance Testing Tools
What are the key challenges of performance testing that BFSI companies face?
Managing voluminous data
BFSI organizations face foremost challenges in the data setup and management of voluminous data and securely handling sensitive datasets. Organizations require efficient testing platforms that can maintain the security of the data and interpret data effectively to deliver critical insights into performance issues and improve the overall app performance.
Capturing deep performance insights
Most testing platforms might fall short in measuring the crucial performance metrics, identifying performance glitches, and offering suggestions for resolving them. The solutions for software testing for BFSI mostly fail to provide wide testing coverage and render a single unified platform to perform the required operations.
Inefficient analysis of performance test outcomes
The analysis and interpretations executed on data need to deliver actionable insights to help resolve the performance bottlenecks. Organizations essentially need to own capabilities for gathering the data, interpreting and analyzing them, measuring performance metrics, and converting them into actionable insights.
How HeadSpin helps BFSI companies conduct performance testing
As banks and financial institutions come across challenges of performance testing to improve app performance and end-user experiences, HeadSpin helps in software automation for the BFSI and streamlines these processes.
HeadSpin offers an AI testing platform to run end-to-end testing for performance optimization, make the apps more efficient and ensure delivering a flawless user experience. The platform offers deep insights into crucial performance KPIs to understand user experience from multiple perspectives and drive the best possible outcomes of performance tests.
Performance testing for evaluating the entire user journey
The data science-driven HeadSpin platform helps monitor and optimize the quality of experience across banking apps and 3rd party interfaces with app performance testing insights.
Capture experience-specific KPIs, perform KPI correlation across apps and different touchpoints, custom-defined app-specific interactions through ML models, and obtain actionable insights with HeadSpin's solution.
Check out: Challenges in Performance Testing on Mobile Devices
Capture performance data from real-world conditions
HeadSpin enables companies to run tests on multiple real devices in different locations across real-world scenarios. HeadSpin Global Device Infrastructure offers access to actual real-world data from combinations of several devices, global locations, real SIM-enabled devices, and across mobile carriers and WiFi networks.
Leverage performance regression capabilities
HeadSpin enables banking organizations to run build-over-build regression to identify performance regressions. Additionally, the platform helps compare performances across
- Various locations to better understand performance across different markets
- Different devices and OSs to understand cross-device/cross-OS compatibility and performance
- Different networks to understand network dependencies
Get intelligent insights for accelerated product development, enhancement, and production monitoring. Learn more.
Improve the performance of biometrics in your apps
HeadSpin Platform helps users to easily add biometric SDK to their apps and allow automation of test cases which require biometric authentication. HeadSpin's biometric SDK allows capturing user experience and helps apps perform seamlessly with facial recognition and fingerprint.
Helpful data visualization dashboards
Obtaining intricate dashboards are beneficial for having a proper understanding of data interpretation and analysis. HeadSpin's data Visualization helps users to consume data collected across various sessions seamlessly and infer experience and performance insights from the data. Replica DB enables users to export test data to their own dashboard solutions or their data lakes and can also be utilized to configure alerts and watchers for continuous monitoring of KPIs.
Utilize data science to obtain insights into app performance
HeadSpin enables companies to measure packet-level network data and device KPIs and analyze them through ML models to render actionable insights.
The platform offers a list of issues automatically detected through user journeys by AI and ML in the form of issue cards. Further, the platform provides a time series view of all client/server interactions with detailed communication breakdowns that can help offer specific insights, including long wait times on the server.
Also check: Your Mobile Performance Testing Questions Answered
Obtain detailed breakdown of network communication and packets and waterfall view to observe client/server interactions with associated TCP, TLS, wait time, and data transfer.
How have leading companies leveraged HeadSpin's performance testing capabilities to enhance the BFSI platforms?
A prominent global payments technology company was focusing on improving the performance of its mobile channel. However, in the course of achieving this, the company was faced with significant challenges while
- Testing apps for client-server communication issues across different geographies
- Pre-release testing and monitoring
- Obtaining insights on user experience and testing the checkout feature on the merchant partners' websites' payment pages
Read: A Complete Guide to User Experience Testing
To help the organization address these pitfalls, HeadSpin offered its AI-driven remote testing capabilities that enabled them to execute pre-release testing and monitoring. The organization seamlessly integrated the HeadSpin Platform into their Appium automation test cycles for an improved experience. In addition, HeadSpin's Performance Session capabilities allowed the client to obtain data and insights into how the app was performing, crucial KPIs, and much more.
HeadSpin's innovative testing and performance optimization solution have further helped several BFSI organizations enhance their digital platforms and offer a seamless experience to the end-users
Conclusion
The incidence of digital transformation in the BFSI industry has simplified a myriad of financial processes for customers. In the course of providing these services, the organizations are required to focus on delivering optimally performing apps to the users for an improved experience on the one hand and heightened brand reputation and revenue generation on the other. HeadSpin's solution assists organizations execute rigorous performance testing to help them increase TAM by delivering the best customer experience through digital channels and deliver flawless user experiences without compromising security.
FAQs
Q1. Why is system integration critical for banking apps?
Ans: System integration in banking applications helps ensure that different modules of the banking app are integrated appropriately, and the client's objective is met.
Q2. What are the key benefits of codeless test automation in the BFSI realm?
Ans: No-code automation helps drive agile testing and delivers the following benefits:
- Faster release cycles
- Improved agility within organizations
- Improved alignment with stakeholders
- Increased profitability
Q3. What do you mean by end-to-end encryption in banking apps?
Ans: Multiple entities like payment cards, merchants, card brands, and other attributes of online transactions exchange a significant amount of sensitive data. This becomes the hotspot for hackers to target. Banking apps, therefore, need to be tested for end-to-end encryption that helps prevent major threats to sensitive data. The apps need to undergo security audits and penetration tests that help drive the overall security of the users.
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