Improving API accessibility with no-code automation testing in the BFS sector

The scope of APIs in the banking and finance industry is ever-increasing. But the rising vulnerabilities pose a threat to their growth. That could also severely affect cloud service dependencies and internal APIs. As APIs evolve with their newer versions, there is a possibility that the functionality and uptime might greatly suffer. Hence, it is critical to test APIs and improve their accessibility for a reliable backend. Financial institutions must establish a strong API testing backbone to improve API accessibility and enhance business values.

Every time we add new functionality, testers must write a new set of codes, install and test them in the frontend, and finally integrate them with the application in the backend. If the code fails to perform at the initial stage, it might affect the feature after integration without fixing the errors.

Software development and testing have changed over the years, and many technologies like DevOps, CI/CD, the API, and Agile methodologies collectively have contributed to this change. As software and applications become more dynamic, the teams have incorporated new techniques to conduct end-to-end quality testing to evaluate the software. 

Why no-code automation testing for API?

API proves to be a source of outstanding end-user experiences as they gradually become the puzzle pieces for modern banking applications. Financial institutions are hosting API-based cloud services to meet user requirements. Yet there is a challenge that organizations must overcome. Cloud offerings change and evolve, and to keep up with API integrations requires continuous testing.

We all know that continuous testing without automation requires time, effort, and money. Organizations must opt for no-code continuous automation testing to prevent code breakage, poor usability, and accessibility. APIs require regression testing frequently, and the QA team manually conducting regression testing is not a viable solution because repetitiveness, monotony, and frequency nature of continuous can introduce errors in the software and take much time to resolve.

Testing APIs are often time-consuming, which also includes a chunk of investment. Thus, organizations are opting for no-code automation testing to reduce the time, money and effort while eliminating errors. No-code automation testing platforms allow developers to create applications following the visual programming models.

No-code automation makes it easy for the team to create API tests and verify functionality and uptime. More the QA and DevOps teams use the no-code automation testing solutions, the faster they will discover an incomparable way to validate high-quality integrations and their UI representations.

What are the crucial areas that need to be examined in API Testing?

API testing focuses on the three most critical aspects of the testing process – connectivity, response, and performance.

  1. Connectivity – Testing the connectivity with the server is the first aspect of API testing. Users who wish to test the connectivity can dial the API using the service URL. The code of this service command is 200. The users can establish a connection if the server responds to the call. Similarly, if there is no response, the connectivity fails.
  2. Response – The second aspect of API testing is to test the correct response time for different API requests. It involves validating the response command with accurate values and an appropriate status code. Following are the examples of validated status codes commonly found in API testing.
    1. Error response code is 401 UNAUTHORIZED in case of missing or invalid authentication token
    1. Error response code is 403 FORBIDDEN when the user is not authorized to perform the operation
    1. Combining the above two, the error response code will be 404 NOT FOUND owing to security reasons
    1. Error response code is 409 CONFLICT if there are duplicate entries or users try to delete root objects
    1. Error response code is 500 INTERNAL SERVER ERROR when the consumer cannot identify the exact error from their end
  3. Performance – The third most important aspect of API testing is the performance of the API. The API performance is tested and validated by calculating the response time of the API request sent. The APIs must handle the load of many requests. The fast response time and resilience toward high loads are the two criteria for evaluating the performance in API testing.

An API may register multiple users. An API must be able to handle the load by distributing, efficiently performing, and responding to a web service call without disrupting the API performance. The quality of APIs is evaluated based on their core functionality, uptime, speed, and end-to-end performance. The end-to-end API assures that all workflows are functional and in perfect order.  

The use of API in the BFS sector

The covid-19 pandemic has changed the financial and banking sector by creating new avenues for API workflows. The banking and financial industries use APIs to address user requirements through this embedded technology. Financial institutions are using APIs in three ways.

  • Private API: Financial institutions use Private APIs to improve their internal processes, operational efficiency, and productivity.
  • Partner API: Financial institutions use Partner APIs to collaborate with third-party partners like clearinghouses, brokerages, underwriters, and custodian banks, where the partners use the bank’s platform to provide outstanding services to their customers.
  • Open/Public API: Financial institutions use Open APIs to gain business and improve their customer bases. With open APIs, organizations are growing their business by extending their services.

Is API testing difficult to conduct without no-code automation solution?

API testing is critical in short release cycles as there are frequent changes. API testing does not affect the test outputs in anyways with the frequent occurring changes. API testing ensures product quality throughout the CI/CD processes. API testing requires users to handle chunks of JSON responses to match fields and surface issues. However, the difficulty will arise for non-developers to implement as testing API responses involves writing code, analyzing JSON, and writing it to variables.

It would be difficult to test asynchronous endpoints, as asynchronous APIs take a little longer to respond due to the unpredictable behavior of background server processes. It requires an infrastructure for continuous testing to test such asynchronous services. What a no-code automation solution does is blend the API and continuous testing. As the automation testing solution is codeless, it is easier for non-developers to implement codeless testing to validate API responses.

How no-code automation testing improves API accessibility for BFS sector?

No-code test automation solution works best with unit testing and regression testing. Both these tests are an integral part of API testing. To improve the API accessibility, the testing team considers integration testing with unit testing. But the fundamental difference between a unit test and an integration test is that the former covers an isolated part of a system with no external dependencies, and the latter covers more of the system put together, which uncovers bugs when multiple units are combined.

Unit tests cover underlying APIs that measure the accessibility of information or interactions to the right place. APIs include UI components validated by unit testing to gain better accessibility to underlying APIs. Additionally, integration testing can also be automated to improve accessibility. Automating both unit testing and integration testing can help reduce regressions effort, simultaneously improving the value and the quality of the applications.

Automating APIs with no-code testing solutions can help reduce the burden of manual testing for the team. Organizations opt for a no-code test automation solution instead of manual testing to be more efficient in their testing services. By building a clear test strategy and adding coverage for accessibility, teams can ensure and inform the quality of the codes within the process and prevent regression burden from deploying to production.

Conclusion

Adopting continuous API testing is a wise decision as it helps resolve underlying API problems like outages, technical failures, and functional glitches. Continuous API testing helps detect early API errors and reduces mean time to recovery (MTTR).

With a no-code API automation testing solution, continuous integration and deployment happen faster and are validated immediately, helping organizations save time, money, and effort.

At Yethi, we understand that the future looks promising in API testing. An increasing number of applications operating on Cloud platforms using ‘as-a-service’ business models need stable and secure functioning APIs. Driven by constant innovation, we utilize it to help organizations reduce the testing time of their applications. We know what it is like to keep up with the competition in the market, and we help financial industries to maintain their commitment. 

With years of experience and expertise in quality assurance of business applications, we combine traditional testing and modern functional and security testing to ensure the quality of APIs in terms of their functionality and platform security. We have developed a library of more than half a million test cases, including used cases, like UPI and lending. With our codeless test automation platform, Tenjin, we have moved up a level in testing and innovation. We automate your end-to-end software testing cycle and validate the request and response configuration of APIs.

Our services and solution align with the open banking ecosystem, and we offer validation coverage that includes functionalities, API security, performance, and automation. Our solution is built with cutting-edge technology and accelerators, adding significant value to time, cost, effort, and customer satisfaction. Contact us for a free consultation.

Why is the Browser and API Testing Shift Left?

Quality assurance and software testing are the key areas of the software development phase. The current scenario is that the software development lifecycle (SDLC) demands integrating testing simultaneously with development. To assess the quality of test codes with ease, teams find it easy to execute testing soon after the development stage across the CI/CD pipeline for better quality checks. It is referred to as shift left testing.

Shift left, initially conducted at the end of the software development lifecycle, is now executed simultaneously in each stage of development (testing comes to the left of the development stage in the workflow process). This technique is becoming exceedingly popular and driving the growth of DevOps and other modern development techniques.

Testing is introduced in the early stage of the product development lifecycle, which allows the team to detect potential bugs, improve brand affinity by building products that customers desire and save time and money for their organizations. After the developers added the end-to-end browser and API testing to CI/CD pipelines, the scope of testing and quality assurance practices have extended.

What is Browser testing?

Browser testing is a type of non-functional testing that validates the performance of a code on different browsers. In addition to this, browser testing also checks how test codes interact with essential data sources. By introducing browser testing to the early stage of the development process, the developers have added another layer of quality testing to check the code compatibility across different browsers. The QA practices are reformed with the addition of browser testing along with other shift-left testing techniques such as unit and security testing in CD/CI pipelines.

The key areas that are analyzed in browser testing

  1. Browser testing validates the basic functionality to ensure that most of these work on different browser combinations. The functionalities such as dialogue boxes, menus, the input fields in the forms, website handling first-party cookies, and seamless touch inputs for mobile and tablets are validated by browser testing.
  2. The website designer chooses a uniform design such as applications fonts, images, and layouts. The team executes browser testing to ensure that the design elements appear the same as the design shared before the execution of the step. 
  3. The team executes browser testing also to check if it meets the accessibility criteria. The account must be compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and accessible to all users with ease.
  4. Browser testing also validates the website responsiveness. The design team ensures that the website design seamlessly adapts and fits the different screen sizes and orientations.

What is API testing?

API testing is a software testing type where we test functionality, security, performance, reliability, accessibility, usability, and API attributes of an Application Programming Interface (API). API is a group of codes or collective codes replicating an interface between two computers. With the help of API, organizations can deploy external systems with their existing programs and extend the verification and computing services beyond the purview of the programs.

Let us start with an understanding of what the Application Programming Interface is. An application is integrated with many data, and how users can access these data through communication with the application interface. Now consider that an organization wants to deploy an external system with their existing one to extend services through other channels; API makes this process effortless.

This connected program and framework need an adequate assessment and verification. Organizations conduct testing at the API level to focus on assessing the business processes, application security, and data responses. As API testing is ideal for DevOps and the continuous testing process, the development and QA teams use and automate it.

API testing is important

API testing is an integral part of the Agile software development process, which needs to incorporate feedback immediately for a smooth process flow. The User Interface or UI testing is inadequate for validating API service functionality and fails to cover necessary aspects of back-end testing. It may lead to the rewriting of innumerable codes, often causing a delay in the product release and a rise in the cost of production. If not detected earlier, it may also result in bugs going unnoticed within the server or unit levels.

API and Unit tests are easy to maintain and effective, and organizations prefer them over other tests. Tests like the GUI test are hard to keep up with the pace of frequent changes in an Agile environment and require continuous reworking.

The developers can begin with API testing early in the development cycle. It allows the developers to resolve the bugs before they become a critical issue. API testing allows the development team to provide improved services and products to their customers. Incorporating API testing into the Agile methodologies can help engineering and development teams to improve the entire development lifecycle and provide outstanding quality products and services to their customers.

The key areas that are analyzed in API testing

The key areas that are analyzed in API are the responses of,

  • Reply time
  • Quality of data
  • Confirmation of authorization
  • HTTP status code and
  • Error codes

Benefits of API testing

  • API testing ensures that the connection among the shared platforms is accessible, reliable, and safe.
  • API test automation is faster and cost-efficient as it requires less code than automated GUI testing.
  • API testing helps developers identify errors in the early development stage and fix the issues before the product release. Developers can access the app to discover the grey areas early without a user interface, allowing them to save time and money.
  • API tests use JSON or XML, and it contains HTTP requests and responses, making them independent of language criteria.
  • API tests analyze applications of harmful codes and breakages. It protects applications by removing all possible vulnerabilities.
  • API tests can be easily integrated with GUI tests before performing the latter. API tests allows to integrate new users to facilitate the testing process.
  • API tests help in analyzing the non-functional tests like security and performance testing as well.

How are both “shift left testing”?

Before we investigate how the browser and API testing is shift-left testing, let us understand what shift-left testing is? Shift-left testing is also defined as “Early and Often” because it analyses the functional aspects of the product at the early stage of the Software Development Lifecycle.

It is easy for the development and testing team in the agile framework to detect the issues early rather than putting them up for the later stage of the software development lifecycle. DevOps executes comprehensive end-to-end automation to enhance product accuracy and efficiency. But, there are other essential functional and non-functional aspects of software testing that need consideration but often go unnoticed.

API testing and browser testing are the perfect examples of shift-left testing, which needs serious consideration to validate the overall quality of the software. By including browser testing and API testing, the production team combines all functional and non-functional aspects into CD/CI pipelines and Continuous testing in a cost-effective and time-effective manner. It helps in reducing operational expenses and maintaining high-quality standards with greater ease. 

API and browser testing is introduced in the agile workflow early during the software development lifecycle and simultaneously runs along with integration, user acceptance, performance, security testing and more. Testing of unit and element can be done separately and integrated with the product during assembling. The practice does not just enhance the product quality but also helps in reducing time, money, and effort. 

Developers verify end-to-end workflows by combing HTTP requests and API calls through API tests. It helps the team validate all the layers of their systems from worldwide locations. Often there can be changes in the UI features that can affect the application performance on the website. The users validate complex navigation with the help of browser testing to ensure that no changes should hamper the application performance and look. It captures user view early at the development stage. 

Tests like API and browser are “shifting left” to earlier stages of the development process to maintain the rapid development pace. Companies are moving towards leveraging CI/CD practices to ensure that the codes are ready to be deployed. By taking the API and browser codes through the CD/CI pipelines, developers can analyze the product compatibility with different browsers. It can also help in detecting bugs earlier in the development cycle.

Running browser and API tests in your CI pipelines can help the teams to compare the tests with data from different stacks like the front end, back end, application, and infrastructure. They will be able to detect and troubleshoot failed tests during the development stage that boosts the QA process and development lifecycle.

Shifting browser and API testing to the left are considered the best option. By doing this development team can monitor any fundamental changes immediately before the final code goes live. It will also help in improving an organization’s business and operational activities.

Conclusion

We follow an agile methodology and framework in Yethi. We have a well-structured and planned environment for continuous testing. Our codeless test automation platform, Tenjin, is a plug-and-play banking-aware solution that is easy to integrate and learn. Tenjin’s robotic capabilities enable to learn and adapt to the application and its updates. Regardless of the complexity and number of updates, Tenjin facilitates continuous testing, minimizing the manual effort and speeding up the test execution, thereby helping you launch your product early in the market.

Our testing solution allows you to test your software at the beginning of the development stage. Testing is executed simultaneously with the development process so that you can test as you build. Tenjin covers comprehensive end-to-end testing, ensuring you have the quality codes and the product. 

Complexities in IT Architecture at Lending Space

The lending market is much bigger than we could probably comprehend. There are various categories of loans, and each has very distinct requirements. Banks and financial institutions have set up their own architecture for lending services – but can they ascertain that they are sorted with the architecture design for loan and credit software and that the architecture is specific to the requirement? It is not just about ensuring system integration; it is a thorough work of confirming system performance and customer satisfaction that is a continuous process.

Banks have complex architectures. They have layers of services and architecture to design, build and manage. This complex architecture makes the process extremely slow, which creates dissatisfaction for many big traditional firms who rely on ageing core architectures for quality services. Banks’ legacy technology is slow to evolve and perhaps will not be cost-effective to replace. Hence, the financial institutions decided to offer a small section of their lending services to the digital lending platform. But where do these digital lending platforms get the information? They must pull the data from the banking lending systems and sometimes from the complex legacy systems. Moreover, the digital lending platforms have their own challenges. 

As per a report in Business Standard, Reserve Bank will be out with the regulatory architecture on the digital lending platform. The reason for this rollout is that the borrowers are extremely dissatisfied with the performance of the digital lending platform. The digital lending business is expanding, but it still has a long way to go before it finally attains its state of technological maturity. Enterprises are using predictive machine learning to implement the scoring model, but for background verification of customers, they must still depend on other third-party agents. Hence, they have not yet achieved the quality of process automation.

Requirement of IT architecture for lending platform

Banks’ lending platforms have layers of services, which makes the lending process extensive and complex. Considering the complexities of the lending platform, banks must build a sustainable system architecture to ensure service fluidity. Banks require a proper IT architecture for lending platforms to offer services to the customers without any issues. It becomes an essential criterion to validate the system functionality, integration, and performance to ensure that the lending platforms can meet all customer requests.

Let us consider a few scenarios.

  1. There can be multiple customer onboarding at the same time
  2. Customers can enter multiple information at the same time
  3. Multiple loan applications can be processed at the same time
  4. Multiple loans can be approved and disbursed simultaneously
  5. There is a need for multiple updates in the lending platform
  6. The digital platform may have to pull data from banks’ legacy platforms or another mainframe computer

The scenarios mentioned above need the support of an endurable IT architecture. Without an applicable IT architecture, you cannot guarantee the performance, integration, and functionality of lending platforms. It offers ease of use and accessibility for clients to ensure their satisfaction while retaining your customers. The system must perform consistently, and the consistency level is hard to achieve without a sound IT architecture. IT architecture allows you to design a guided workflow and work effectively to strengthen the lending platform performance.

The lending platform is the storehouse of intensive and extensive data that creates an immense load on the system. A proper IT architecture enables banks to generate data on time and reduce the delay in management reporting and data analysis. It reduces the impact of service flow in the long run.

The modern lending platforms are extremely nimble. The features and functionalities keep changing with customer requirements and requests. Running multiple projects without an adequate IT architecture will be cumbersome. Appropriate software architecture can essentially help you achieve the end goals. However, the IT architecture tends to be complex for the complicated lending platform. It must handle the workflow, several actions, repeated requests, task execution, and more. The criticalities in the lending market demand an equally complex IT architecture, which can be made easy by handling it appropriately.

Why is the IT architecture complex for lending platform? IT architecture for Loan Originating Systems (LOS) and Loan Management Systems (LMS)

The lending systems handles many processes flow. We can broadly classify them in seven stages – loan credibility, loan application, loan processing, underwriting process, credit decision, quality check, loan funding.

The organization uses the Loan Originating Systems (LOS) or the Loan software to assess the customers’ creditworthiness. The LOS covers the loan onboarding lifecycle/flow, data entry and verification, the credit assessment, credit approval, sanction letters, declaration letters, AD, welcome letter disbursement and more.

The Loan Management System (LMS) supports entire client lifecycle, loan onboarding, lead management, loan repayment, loan servicing, customer level maintenance, reports, delinquency and NPA processing, collections, credit score factor analysis to mistake correction and repayment strategies.

Both LOS and LMS offer a range of services over a single platform. Alongside offering so many services over a single platform, it is also essential to ensure customer experience and satisfaction and retain them. Customers want to be assured about the system’s performance and functionalities while applying for a loan, purchasing products and services on EMIs, and more.

Managing multiple workflows, massive databases, and customer profiling while ensuring customer satisfaction can make the end-to-end lending process a complex one. It becomes even more tougher without an appropriate IT architecture. An IT architecture must handle the configuration of new loan products, entire loan lifecycle or workflows, fraud prevention mechanism, analysis of data, and more.

Lending systems must capture the information from credit bureaus, accept payments from many service providers, integrate with CRM platforms, accounting systems, collection and credit organizations, and more. It must be able to integrate services from services providers. When enterprises integrate multiple services and some from third-party agents, the IT architecture tends to be more complex.

Lending services are no longer following the traditional process. With a digital platform, lenders are offering direct access to their customers. Financial institutions must address multiple requests of their customers of validating information and data, updating information, uploading documents, accessing messages, and more. All these requests make the IT architecture extremely complex. The main systems must be in connection with the digital lending platform so that whenever customers seek and pull information, the banks’ systems can respond to their requests.

What is the solution? Can testing control the complexities of IT architecture?

Maintaining the system quality can help you deal with the complex IT architecture of the lending platform. A lending platform needs multi-platform and language support. Only the required member should be able to access the lending platforms. It causes less traffic on the website and can control the complexities of IT architecture. 

A lending platform must be integrated with multiple platforms to offer required information to the users. Through integration testing, enterprises can control the complexities of IT architecture. Companies also validate the scalability of the lending platform to ensure that the load is equally distributed. It also checks for the systems’ durability with multiple users using the lending platform simultaneously.

Unauthorized logins can create an uncalculated risk for the website that can intensify the complexities of IT architecture. Security testing ensures that the systems are encrypted for access, the users have role-based access control, and the access criteria of role-based access control are defined.

It is also crucial to test your system flexibility, user-defined fields, custom workflows, and definition of products and services. One of the main criteria of a lending platform is to check if the functionalities must be the same for the open-platform or commercial bank systems. You must also validate the components used in open-platform and commercial bank systems. One of the most important criteria is to check whether we can reuse the custom services and components. Isolating the platform-specific UI code from the main source code line will also help control the complex IT architecture.

Conclusion

We cannot reduce the complexities in IT architecture in the lending space, but we can handle the complex framework of the lending platform. We can control the significant complexities in the lending platforms through the right strategy, distribution, authorization, and access. Organizations must validate their systems frequently to ensure that the system quality is up-to-the-mark. When the IT architecture is already complicated, assuring the system quality will be an added burden, which organizations can ease through thorough end-to-end testing.

Yethi has executed multiple lending projects across more than 22 global countries. Our services include functional and non-functional testing. Our testing experts can provide the most appropriate advice for your lending project to help you achieve the highest ROI on your test implementation projects. Our 5th generation robotic test automation solution, Tenjin, is easy to integrate with all leading lending platforms. It reduces your testing time to 45% and enhances the quality of financial and banking software.

Test Automation ROI Primer

Software Testing Automation has gained significant acceptance in enterprises in recent years. Many organizations struggle to identify the value drivers in a test-automation purchase and might take decisions based on partial data. 

This article is an attempt to help people understand why automation would make sense, how to understand the various platforms out there, how to balance the economics and present an ROI to ensure proper communication of the expectations.

Let us start by understanding the need for testing automation –

Software is consistent – Any software will consistently perform actions as per the instructions. While the instruction set might be suspect, the software would be consistent irrespective of the day of the week, the temperature outside or any of the factors that impact humans.

Software is exact – Logical structures have no room for common sense.  So, the onus on the developer to understand intent and implications is high.  Given that majority of enterprise software, today consists of a myriad set of options, the chances that a particular combination of options (an option set) might work contrary to intentions is high. 

The software will evolve – Any software that you use is amorphous and would continue to evolve as long as there are customers and/or developers that wish to tinker. Change is typically due to innovation, competition, regulation, or adaptation. 

Software is fragile – New features and options must be delicately introduced, considering the existing options and their usage.  It is very much possible to unintentionally “break” an “option-set” while bringing in some new capabilities. 

Software Testing – Considering these attributes, it is imperative that software is tested – when it is designed, built, deployed, or modified. The discipline of software testing has been evolving in parallel to software development, albeit in the shadows. Considering the repetitive nature of software testing, a lot of research and effort has been spent on reducing the “drudgery” of the repetitive tasks by adopting automation in the practice of testing.  Automated testing is a large part of the public debate and we have explored why exploratory and automated testing needs to coexist in our article here.    

In this article, we would attempt to share how test automation supports the mission of consistently deploying reliable software and how one could explore the ROI of these efforts. This is important as Test Automation is primarily a tool to improve efficiency and not a tool to improve the effectiveness of your tests.  

What Constitutes Test Automation

The practice of software testing essentially is a stimulus-response study. You provide stimulus to the software (“Application under-test” or AUT) and validate if its response meets a predetermined criterion. 

The profession of software testing is to

  1. identify various stimulus-response conditions (test-cases) that could be encountered during the use of the software
  2. plan and execute a sequence of such test-cases
  3. capture and report software behavior,

Test Automation is an aid to a software tester, where the execution and reporting of a certain subset of cases are delegated to the automation software. 

 Automation allows teams to focus on “net-new”

As software gets enriched, the testing burden shifts from testing “new” feature to testing the “existing” features.  In the graph, we have shown 5 sprints where each bar represents newsprint.  The “new” functionality in each sprint is shown in “blue” and the “existing” features from previous sprints are in “grey”. You would notice that while the volume of new features is relatively steady, the volume of “existing” features has grown with every release.    

While leaders are happy to spend time/effort on testing the blue portions, the repetitive testing of the grey portions is a shoe that pinches. Re-testing of functionality that has been available for a few releases represents a unique set of challenges across all stakeholders. From a tester’s perspective, it is repetitive and therefore boring. It is very likely to only get a cursory look-over and not an in-depth review.  From a sponsor’s perspective, it represents an ever-increasing volume of work that often has a low-return element.  Therefore, we risk under-testing and letting defects slip into “deemed-stable” portions of our software.  Test-automation represents a middle path, where the code can be tested for a larger sample of usage conditions at a lower cost-time construct where only the exceptions are picked-up for further evaluation. 

What benefits can I expect? What benefits should I not expect?

The investment in the right automation tool once set up offers potential benefits like:

Coverage: You could achieve a higher test coverage / larger sampling of the software functionality, faster and at a lower execution effort, than what you would get with pure manual efforts. 

Speed:  Automated tests can run faster and round the clock.  These could reduce your overall time-to-test significantly, giving more time to development teams to fix any potential issues. 

Consistency: Test automation tools offer maximum consistency. The same test case runs multiple times without even a minor deviation.

Effort:  Test Automation can be set up to run with little or no manual intervention. 

The Caveats

Setup: Setting up tests on any automation tool is a laborious task.  It requires planning and foresight that only experience would bring. Knowledge of how data changes across time, what variables would need to be dynamically updated and how to validate expected outcomes etc. require experience and time. 

Maintenance:  Once you have set up a large library of cases to be automatically executed, it should be smooth sailing; or so we think!!  The challenge of test automation (and therefore where money is generally made or lost) is how easy it would be to maintain this comprehensive library when your underlying application changes. When the “Application-Under-Test” changes, you would have to identify all aspects of your automation that consequently need a change.  

Test Automation – Understanding Costs & Benefits

Companies are increasingly investing in test automation considering the increased frequency of changes and anticipated cost-benefit. The investment in the right automation tool is worth it, as it offers potential benefits like:

Coverage: Test automation offers high test coverage with nearly 100% results, which otherwise cannot be achieved by manual testing.

Consistency: Test automation tools offer maximum consistency. The same test case was run multiple times without deviation.

Speed: Automation is multiple times greater than the manual testing speed. 

Effort: The manual effort in executing a test automation tool is almost negligible.

Test-automation solutions are varied and bring different categories of over-bearing costs

The cost of the test automation can be categorized as:

  • Acquisition cost
  • Maintenance cost

Acquisition cost: There are some free test automation tools available in the market. The free versions mostly perform basic functions and are not recommended for thorough end-to-end or regression testing.

To buy an efficient test automation tool, you will require to make some investment. A licensed and open-source automation tool may start with as low as $4000, depending on the brand and functionality it offers. The total acquisition cost is often inclusive of the tool cost and construction cost. Before investing in the tool, it is recommended to do thorough research and understand the right tool that will complement your requirements perfectly.

Maintenance cost: The maintenance cost of automated tests drives expenses up. Maintenance may involve a range of factors:

  • Process
  • User interface
  • Data
  • Environment

However, maintenance of automated tests may cost you a bit, statistics reveal the fact that maintenance can be a lot cheaper affair than creating new test scripts. Furthermore, frequent maintenance will keep the system efficient and seamless. Maintenance is a good option while considering the cost model of the project, as manual testing or implementing new automation tools can be expensive and time-consuming.

Diagram Description automatically generated with medium confidence

Test Automation ROI

Now that we have given you an understanding of the costs and benefits of test automation, we go further deep into exploring the ROI of these efforts. Companies are constantly investing in test automation, but investment in test automation without proper calculation of ROI would be a half-baked effort, which is unacceptable for the companies.

At the beginning of this article, we have stated that test Automation is primarily a tool to improve efficiency, and the calculation of ROI determines the efficiency of your test automation process. Test automation is a one-time investment. Configuring the test automation at the initial stage of project inception can maximize the benefits in the long run. By calculating ROI, companies can decide to invest in test automation.

Calculating ROI does not necessarily mean that we would focus on the overall cost, which is required to evaluate the quality of the product. ROI calculation also includes the parameters like late releases, defects overlooked, and lack of quality.

One of the biggest challenges that the companies face is investing a large sum of money for conducting the end-to-end testing of software, which often they are unable to recoup. Once the companies decide what test sets or subsets they must automate, they will generate a high return on investment.

Due to poor decision-making, companies may spend a lot to adopt automation at the later stage of development, and if the project fails, they may incur a high loss. ROI-based automation testing resolves this issue. The Quality Assurance team decides which section must be automated based on the clients’ environment, system, and machine. They can do a cost comparison analysis of manual test runs and automation test runs and determine the types of scripts that can be automated.

Following are the significant metrics, which can be considered while calculating automated testing ROI.

  • Measure product quality – Ensuring the overall quality of the product by identifying defects and mean time to detection of defects.
  • Test execution speed – Comparing the test run duration percentage between automated and manual testing.
  • Thorough cost and resource analysis – Analyzing cost and resources are important as the test automation process involves software and hardware costs, prioritizing defects based on their severity, operational costs, the requirement of new resources, training costs, and more.

With the metrics mentioned above, we can calculate Automated Testing ROI. The cost that companies bear on resources, tools used, setting up the testing framework and more fall under companies’ investments. The net gain that the companies receive over their investments would be the ROI for the automation testing.

Following are the parameters required for performing ROI calculation.

Automating new tests – There are always a certain amount of costs involved in automating new tests. Before initiating the automation of new tests, companies must consider the predictable costs of developing, executing, and maintaining the tests. Based on the test categorization, you would segregate the test to automate or run manually.

Automate regression testing – Adding new features or changes in software would introduce new bugs in the existing modules. It makes regression testing one of the most expensive phases of testing. It is a necessary step to calculate the cost of automating regression testing.

Managing Multiple Environments – As companies develop products, they must be convinced that their product works equally in different environments. Hence, companies set up multiple platforms, devices, and browsers to ensure the success of their products. For organizations, it is necessary to calculate the ROI while setting up test environments.

Minimizing Defect Leakage – There are instances where bugs were detected at the production phase, as they were not resolved at the development stage. It often leads to defect leakage in the production phase, making it an expensive issue for organizations. Calculating ROI is necessary for companies to control such overhaul expenditures in certain instances.

Reusable test cases – Using reusable test cases saves time and effort by avoiding task duplication. When you already have created test cases, you can reuse them in multiple scenarios. Hence this will impact while calculating ROI.

Protecting product knowledge – Companies may still gain control over their systems and software, but they need to take a calculative risk on their resources. If an engineer leaves, the company must look for a replacement and provide training for the job. It may impact the company’s long-term automation testing ROI.

Ways to improve Automated Testing ROI

Instead of automating all the tasks at hand, it is best to automate repetitive tasks. Automating the applications, which are not steady, may not show an accurate result. Moreover, it may increase your team’s effort and affect while calculating ROI.

Automation testing works best for regression testing. Hence, when new tests and integrated with the older ones and applications are tested across various platforms, automation testing can be implemented to save time, effort, and overall costs. Further, if you need to complete the test run in a shorter time, you can run parallel testing like a smoke test.

Changes are introduced frequently in software. Hence, the developers and testers are relying on exploratory testing which is widely used in agile models. The focus of exploratory testing is discovering, investigating, and learning through the process. The testers here own the freedom and responsibility to think and note down ideas before the test execution. As exploratory testing is strategic, it helps in improving automated testing ROI.

The testing process has evolved, and today shift-left testing is a popular step in the software development lifecycle. Shift-left testing allows you to detect defects in the early stage, which helps in reducing effort, time, and money. You could also use test management tools to identify redundant test cases at the early stage of the development process. Finally, keep thorough documentation of the process so that the newly hired resources can pick up where your previous resources have left.

Conclusion

The company adopts automation testing to improve its test efficiency and test coverage. Of all the possible methods, which could be applicable for calculating the automated testing ROI, the company must adopt the strategies, which work best for them and suffice their requirements.

When it is about improving the quality of your product, the right methodology would be to test your applications simultaneously while developing them. If defects are detected at the postproduction stage, the company will suffer monetary loss, which may be unacceptable for any organization. Hence, a little strategy, the right tool, and differentiation between manual and automation testing can successfully help you implement test automation ROI.

5 challenges of testing ERP systems in the banking sector and ways to overcome the challenges

There are multiple reasons why the banking and financial industry needs enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. ERP system facilitates agile delivery in the broader spectrum of banking and financial services and solutions. The system is used to understand the implementation at a large scale. The ERP systems offer solutions to multiple issues in the banking industry and help with thorough insights for upcoming projects. The ERP system helps in resource planning and increases the efficiency and productivity of an organization. The organizations have seen visible results by implementing ERP systems due to their benefits like,

  1. Improves business reporting – ERP creates one integrated database for all business processes and provides real-time information and comprehensive business reports.
  2. Improves customer services – ERP systems offer better accessibility to customer information with an improved response time, on-time delivery, and order accuracy.
  3. Better inventory costs – ERP systems include only the most essential inventory and avoid common problems like higher overhead costs and longer customer fulfilment times.
  4. Improves cash flow – ERP systems offer better invoicing. It is a superior collection tool that enhances cash flow. Faster cash inflow allows adequate investment for the business.
  5. Improves cost savings – ERP system allows cost-saving with improved inventory planning, customer services, procurement, and vendor relationship management.
  6. Improves data and cloud Security – ERP system has dedicated security resources, which prevent installing malicious software. It improves data and cloud security as the data is spread across multiple servers.
  7. Improves business process – ERP system helps improve mundane or manual tasks and implements smarter workflows allowing you to work more efficiently.
  8. Manages supply chain – ERP systems effectively forecast demand and lean inventory. It reduces the production bottleneck and offers greater transparency in your business.

However, the organization cannot always guarantee the successful implementation of ERP systems. ERP implementation can fail at its pilot phase due to multiple reasons. Poor project management, data inaccuracy or quality issues, implementation without adequate planning, ineffective consultation, inability to reduce the implementation cost, and more are a few reasons for ERP implementation failures. ERP implementation depends largely on the organizational approach. The organization may invest time and money only to see process stagnancy with little to no significant growth.

Testing of ERP systems in the banking and financial industry

ERP systems in banks and financial institutions are a procedure to plan and are commonly used by banks and financial institutions because of time constraints. ERP implementation works best with the right planning and strategy. It enhances the productivity and effectiveness of the process and people, supports business operations, and helps in business decision-making. ERP systems in banks and financial institutions can be tested at the core level and implementation level. The core team validates the static functionality of ERP systems, while the implementation team validates the dynamic and tailored features and functionalities.

The changes in features and functionalities, as we know in the banking industry, are extremely frequent. A small change in the system features can affect the workflow of multiple modules. The changes must be recorded and validated accordingly to ensure that none of the changes alters the system configurations. A system with a massive amount of data requires test automation. The organization analyzes the requirements and designs the automation test framework based on organizational infrastructure.

Challenges of testing ERP systems

  1. Frequent changes and inaccurate data – The ERP system implementation is a long process during which the system performance can fluctuate a great deal. The entire implementation process involves multiple risks that must be addressed in time. Banking systems are vulnerable and open to frequent changes. Due to the frequency of changes in the banking structure, the update must be constant and continuous, which also requires system receptibility. The changes must reflect in the system without delay. If there is a delay in data reflection to the system, there will be a discrepancy in available data that leads to data inaccuracy.
  2. Integration of new data with old legacy systems – Banking ERP systems have a broader scope. The dataset entered in the bank ERP systems is used in the various processes throughout the organization. The data is used in Marketing & Sales, Accounting & Finance, Supply Chain Management, Human Resources and many more. The data is stored centrally in the old legacy systems and referred to by various organizational verticals for different purposes. The main challenge here is it often becomes hard to test these legacy systems due to the absence of adequate tools. As the legacy systems store a high volume of data, the end-to-end testing of the legacy systems becomes necessary. It is a time-consuming and tedious task to test the legacy systems. In the case of banks migrating data from legacy systems to new ERP platforms, there can be a delay in the entire testing project leading because of slow data migration and unavailability of data, which can lead to multiple errors in the systems and banks’ internal processes.
  3. Implementing ERP in rush and without planning – This challenge is common when banks start their operation for the first time. Due to rising demand and customer requirements, banks and financial institutions are sometimes in a rush to implement ERP systems and critical aspects of the ERP systems can be overlooked. The urgency of implementing the ERP systems always leads banks to ignore the critical aspects of ensuring system quality. It also leads to implementing ERP software without adequate planning. If the systems are implemented in rush it might lead to multiple performance issues, data integration and security, data migration issues and more.
  4. Lack of project knowledge – Lack of project knowledge can lead the team to witness challenges of testing ERP systems. The team must have adequate project knowledge and training to learn about the project requirements. Adequate communication and training about project requirements make the ERP testing process easy and convenient for the team. With adequate project knowledge, the testing team can validate various aspects of ERP implementation at the various phases across the business operation.
  5. Lack of technical knowledge and absence of specialized team – ERP testing in banks is not a mission-critical practice, which leads backs to ignore a few critical aspects of ERP implementations. Banks and financial organizations execute testing ERP implementation along with other crucial testing projects. And often, the management team do not feel the need to delegate the most competent team. Banks also do not deploy a specialized team for testing the ERP platform. Banks cannot guarantee the success of ERP implementation testing due to a lack of technical knowledge and a specialized testing team.

Ways to overcome the challenges of testing ERP systems

All the components and modules of the ERP platform must pass through system integration testing. ERP being a central data system is a data source for multiple verticals. If the source data is not integrated efficiently, the processes within the organizations will not receive adequate and accurate data creating an immense discrepancy in the organizations. Banks’ data and information require utmost security and safety against data theft and manipulation. Hence, security testing is critical to ensure the safety of sensitive data.

Due to multiple changes incorporated in the Bank ERP systems, there can be a few alterations in the user interface design. It can also lead to confusion among the users. Hence with each implementation, it is necessary to ensure that the changes meet user requirements. System efficiency is crucial even with effective changes. An adequate module validation can ensure that even with several changes, implementations, and interpretations, the design flow of the interface remains intact. System integration and usability testing ensure that users can use the systems without disruptions.

It is necessary to validate the performance of the ERP system. The ERP system’s accuracy and speed determine its performance. It is crucial to validate the systems of their load, stress, capacity, volume, and scalability to ensure the reliability and stability of the system even with its extreme load. The performance of banking systems comes under heavy scrutiny from users or customers. Hence, testing the software before installation is essential to always ensure seamless performance.

Even a slight change can impact on the system’s performance, and as far as banking systems are concerned, the changes are extremely frequent. Regression testing ensures that the minor changes do not affect another subsequent module. As modules are interdependent, the poor performance of one module can heavily impact another. Through testing, the team ensures that all the modules and features run smoothly without any errors.

Conclusion

Testing ERP systems has drawbacks, but since ERP systems are not among the most critical functioning systems, banks and financial institutions tend to delay the testing of ERP systems or keep it long on their bucket list. It does not reduce the complexities of ERP system testing but aggravates it. The most pertinent approach is to address the issue by testing simultaneously with the implementation process. The most accurate approach is to build an appropriate implementation strategy and plan to avoid resolving the issues at a later stage. It is always a good idea to prevent rather than fix the occurrence.

5 challenges in the digital customer onboarding process and ways to combat the challenges

What difference have you noticed between customer onboarding before and after the Covid-19 pandemic? Let’s say you wanted to apply for a loan before Covid. You had to raise a request and enter the details on the bank website, and within 24 hours, the bank representative would visit you at your address to complete all the paper formalities. Customer verification in person was an essential aspect of customer onboarding whether you physically visit a branch or any representative visits you.

Due to social distancing and contactless interaction during Covid-19, the footfall in the branches was reduced. It completely changed the customer onboarding process. A few technologies have played a massive role in determining the customer digital onboarding process and simplifying the process for both customers and banks. Video KYC, geo-location verification, aadhar-based customer verification, and more were the go-to solutions for the industries. Financial organizations and Fintech launched multiple applications (mobile and web) to ensure that the process of digital onboarding can be carried out without disruption and offer a seamless experience.

Digital onboarding is no longer about getting and converting new customers or retaining the old ones. It is more of a service, an added benefit offered by the banks to their customers. It determines the relationship banks establish with their customers and ensures satisfaction over the digital journey of customers. However, the digital onboarding process is at a nascent stage, and the journey is not over until the customers can use the services without any interruptions. There are definitely some challenges that both customers and organizations face and strive to overcome. In this article, we will explore the challenges organizations and customers face with digital onboarding and ways they can overcome them.

Challenges of customer digital onboarding

  • Platform Security – The platform security of digital onboarding is a vital challenge that customers and financial institutions face daily. It is hard to protect both customer and organizational data in traditional banking. When the data are shared on the digital platform, it requires a stringent security mechanism to protect data from stealing and manipulation.

The traditional customer onboarding process is lengthy and time-consuming. It has several steps like document submission and verification, a branch visit followed by an online application, and approval waiting. With digitalization, customers no longer prefer the long awaiting time of traditional ways of onboarding. Hence, many financial institutions, the majority of them have opted for the digital onboarding process. The customer in the digital onboarding process must follow the entire process, but instead of visiting the branch, the whole process is taken care of on the digital platform.

Before the pandemic, the onboarding process was a mix of digital submission and branch visits. But in 2020-2021, much has changed. The recent trend is the end-to-end onboarding process is done on the digital platform without the need for customers to visit the branches for formalities. Since customer uploads all documents on digital applications, security could be a concern for banks. Each bank may have a set of challenges, including identity verification compliance and security issues.

  • Complex UI features – It is a massive disappointment for customers if they are required to navigate through complex UI functionalities during their onboarding journey. Customers cannot relate to applications with complex UI designs. Hence, the banking and financial industry faces an immense challenge in keeping up with customer expectations for a simplistic and user-friendly application. Several survey reports have confirmed that customers tend to appreciate digital platforms with clean UI design. If you feed in too many irrelevant and unnecessary features like pop-ups, action buttons, or others, customers would not think twice about leaving the site and would not return.
  • Performance glitches – Performance errors in digital applications are frequent. Banks create service-based APIs to establish connections between the application and customers’ bank account details. The API can retrieve financial information from the banks and send the information back to the banks. The digital platform for the onboarding process can face a tremendous setback if the platform does not meet up to the expectation of handling multiple requests simultaneously. If the applications cannot bear the request volume and the load, they would easily face the performance bottleneck.

A poor digital onboarding platform performance can disappoint the customers, who might discontinue using the platform. Customers using the digital onboarding platform continuously can also create immense stress on the platform. If the platform is not robust and capable, it will not be able to endure the maximum system usage and might face performance errors. Most digital onboarding platform fails because of these performance errors. Customers associate themselves with systems that are stable and have longevity. A poor-performing digital onboarding platform will not be able to retain customers.

  • Lack of personalization – Not all customers want the same services. Different customers have different needs. Hence, personalization is crucial to retaining the most loyal customers. Most digital onboarding platform fails to personalize the applications based on customers’ needs and wants. It is challenging to keep up with customer expectations as customers’ needs may vary. Lack of personalization leads to dissatisfied customers. Users will not engage with the platform if the platform fails to meet with adequate and personalized digital services.
  • Delay in resolving grievance redressal – Since digital platforms are a combination of services by multiple third parties, it is hard to track the complaints. In the case of digital onboarding, there may be multiple agents integrating their services with a single platform. If any grievance arises, the users will not know whom to raise a complaint to and how long would it take to resolve the issues. The apprehensive customers will either solve the errors or leave the platform without even informing regarding the discontinuation of services.

Following are the instances of consequences that organizations must face if challenges remain unresolved.

  • Users may sign up for a month’s free trial and discontinue using the service. As per a report, 40 to 60% of users who sign up for a free trial use a product once and never come back. As low as 2.97% continue the service even after a month.
  • Many customers lose interest after using the platform for a week. As per a report, almost 75% of new users leave in the first week.

It may be noted that organizations gain 65% of the business revenue from their existing customer and the chances are that most satisfied customers will recommend your business. Hence, organizations must address the challenges before it becomes too late to address them.

Ways to overcome these challenges

Customers are the ones who use your end products. When you think about your products, you must have customers in your mind and think from their perspectives. Banks and financial institutions have already handled customer onboarding traditionally. They know what their requirements and customer expectations are. Hence, while tackling customer onboarding digitally, they can enter only those fields that are necessary for customer onboarding to avoid the lengthy onboarding process.

For a successful customer onboarding process, the lesser features always guarantee a better user experience. Include only the necessary UI features and leave out the rest. The most relevant features can add value to your digital application and help to retain your customers. Avoid complicated User Interface design and opt for the most minimalist layout with the right combination of adequate features and nothing more to clutter your application with unnecessary action buttons, service menus or more. User retention is based on building the application with simplistic designs. If you notice your customer engagement with your platform outnumbers the time, they begin using the application for the first time, it will determine your customer experience. An outstanding customer experience is worth all your effort. Functional UI testing ensures that all fields, navigations, pop-ups, buttons, and other functional UI elements are working without any technical error. 

Usability testing is important as it tracks the user to transition from the time they sign-up to using the product for the first time. By conducting usability testing, organizations can examine and verify the points that conflict with user expectations. For a smooth digital onboarding process, financial institutions require a clean user-friendly interface. It enables the business to gain direct revenues.

Security testing is a critical way to ensure the security of the digital onboarding platform. It ensures that the platform maintains identity verification compliance and overcomes security issues and challenges.

Performance testing ensures the system’s capability and stability during the onboarding process. Performance testing ensures that the APIs manage the load and perform as expected. It removes the performance bottleneck and reduces the resolution time.

A personalized digital onboarding process is key to engaging your customers. Customer seamless onboarding experience will make them delighted. And they will return to your site without hesitation.

Do reach out to your customer and collect their feedback. The customers feel connected to the businesses that value their opinion, suggestion, and feedback. Most organizations add online feedback forms to help them immediately capture customer reactions and avoid losing them. It is a dynamic step that can help you to retain your customers. The most honest feedback can help you to improve your digital onboarding processes and help you to serve your customers with no regrets.

At Yethi, we have tested the digital onboarding process for a few of our clients. We have supported our clients in transformational projects to the digital platform by offering them end-to-end testing. From security testing to performance and functional UI testing, we have helped our clients to serve their customers with outstanding services and gain high ROI on their business.

Our 5th generation robotic test automation solution, Tenjin, is easy to integrate with all major banking platforms. This intuitive solution can reduce the time to market and help you save money and effort.  

Is there a difference in QA services for Retail and Corporate Banking?

The need for QA services in the banking and financial industry is increasing with the rise of technology and innovation. Following the digitalization trend, banks and financial institutions are transforming their front-office and mid-office. The back-office operations, which were still on pen and paper, are slowly brought into the digital platform. And with this sudden burst of digitalization, banks cannot long put their QA needs on the back burner. On the contrary, alongside the digital transformation in banks and FIs, the quality assurance services are also going through a massive digital transformation.

Banks’ digital transformation journey has been in the limelight for over a decade, but the years 2020-2021 have been significant when it comes to growth in digitization. As per a report in Sensor Tower, nearly 1.24 billion financial applications were downloaded in the second quarter of 2020, which in the first quarter of 2022 has gone up by 1.74 billion.

Banks’ digital transformation journey is driven by customer demands, new trends and technologies, and market competition.  Banks have no other options but to evolve and embrace the digital transformation journey. If we track the current trend in the banking sector, we will understand that banks are currently using advanced technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, cloud services, and blockchain to digitize the banking systems. If banks must cater to customers and ensure customer satisfaction digitalization is the only option. However, in this digital transformation journey, customer experience and data security will be on focus for banks and financial institutions.

Whether in core banking, capital markets, retail banking, or corporate banking, digitalization has become a revolutionary movement across all financial and banking sectors. The financial industry now depends greatly on technology. They deal with multiple clients and handle various transactions daily. Banks need to have essential QA strategies to ensure that the systems work at all times without any disruptions. QA testing helps banks improve their systems and products and ensure customer satisfaction with an error-free transaction mechanism.

In this article, I will compare the QA services in corporate and retail banks. Is there a difference in the QA services for retail and corporate banking? What is the striking factor differentiating the QA services in these two banking segments? We will also explore the service lines in these two banks and the types of QA services offered to ensure the quality of their services. 

Understanding the Retail Banking

Retail banking is also known as consumer banking or personal banking. The services in retail banking are tailored to cater for individuals and small companies. Many banks offer a basic range of services like account maintenance, lending, line of credit, mortgages, credit and debit cards and more.

Retail banks offer branch banking and online or digital services based on specific customer needs. Retail banks help the consumer maintain saving accounts, earn interest on saving accounts, withdraw funds, pay for products, loans, and more. Retail banks in the current time have undergone massive digital transformation. They are offering a range of services on the digital platform to ensure customer convenience.

Services and digitalization in retail banking

Retail banks offer the following services to consumers,

  1. – Customers open bank accounts to keep a track of their money, savings, transactions, and more.
  2. – Customers can keep their jewellery and valuables in the safe lockers available in banks.
  3. – Customer can maintain their deposits through CDs as the accumulation of interest amount is higher in CDs than in saving accounts.
  4. – Retail banks provide various loans to the consumers like home loans, auto loans, education loans, personal loans and more based on individual requirements.

Apart from the services mentioned above, a few commercial banks offer services like investment banking, commercial banking, and more. Some investment and commercial banks have dedicated services for retail customers to expand business relationships.

Digitalization in retail banking – Retail banks are building mobile applications to offer various services to customers online.  Through mobile applications, customers maintain their accounts, transfer from one account to another, pay bills, pay for products and services at the merchandise, and more. Consumers can also avail of loans online without any paperwork.

These days customer bank accounts are linked with the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) platform to provide a range of services to the customers through APIs. As per a report by Business Standard, UPI processed nearly 6 billion transactions worth Rs 10 trillion in May 2022, the highest volume ever recorded since the launch of the UPI platform in 2016.

QA services in the retail banking

The number of customers in the retail banks is more. Because of the services retail banks offer their customers, the banks tend to receive multiple requests at the same time. It creates an immense load on banks’ servers and systems. Consider a scenario; a bank receives multiple customer requests on a busy weekday building a performance load on their systems. If the bank’s systems cannot handle the load and send delayed responses to the customer, it will create a negative impression on the customers.

Bank systems are expected to be up and running all the time. Ensuring that the systems perform as expected even during high traffic requires an adequate QA service. However, the QA services are not just about checking the performance criteria of the banking systems. The scope and scale of quality assurance are much broader in retail banks. From system integration to functional acceptance and maintaining system security, the banks’ systems must undergo end-to-end system validation to ensure that they offer outstanding customer services without disruption.

Ensuring the quality of systems requires thorough strategizing, planning, preparation, and execution. Standard QA services for retail banks must encompass the ability to validate core banking solutions, lending platforms, CRM, payment, various channels, digital platforms, and more. The following comes as a bundle of QA services that retail banks require to ensure the quality of the banking systems.

  1. Requirements Assurance – Organizations do a thorough requirement analysis of the application under test before starting with the test process. As the scope of testing is wide and varied in retail banks, it is critical to gather the requirements before executing the test.
  2. Integration Assurance – The systems running in retail banks need multiple features to be integrated. The integration must be validated with the application suite and system landscape. The system integration ensures that the application has all the required fields added to the applications and systems.
  3. Functional Assurance – The retail banks’ systems will fail if users face accessibility or usability issues. The retail bank systems must pass the functionality tests to ensure that they conform with user acceptance.
  4. Non-functional Assurance – Due to the heavy volume of transactions, the systems in retail banks face two common issues performance bottleneck and security. Both are essential aspects when it comes to ensuring the quality of the systems. An adequate quality assurance service cannot do without validating these critical aspects.
  5. Automation Testing – The time to market the banking services and products has reduced significantly due to rising customer demand. Financial software is one of the data-intensive applications and the time-to-market is less. Hence, banks and financial applications require extensive test automation. Automation testing significantly reduces the time of product launch, improves accuracy, enhances team productivity, and most importantly it saves money.
  6. Regression Testing – Regression testing is one of the essential testing processes for retail banks. As retail banks serve multiple customers simultaneously, the applications in the retail banks require frequent changes in the features and functionality to enable them to offer personalized services to their customers. By adding new features and functionality, the existing features may respond with some errors. Regression testing in retail banking systems ensures that the existing application features work just as fine in collaboration with additional new features.

Understanding the Corporate Banking

Corporate banks are a part of business banking that offers their services only to the corporates. Corporate banking offers several benefits to its corporate customers. Since the services are tailored to suit the requirements of the corporate customers, corporate banks offer unique propositions on customers’ salary accounts, regular salary updates on websites, corporate card facilities, multiple reimbursements, and allowances such as meal vouchers, medical reimbursements, leave travel allowances, gift cards, conveyance, fuel allowances, and more.

Corporate customers can also receive special rates on National Pension System, captive ATM within the company premises, travel cards, working capital, long-term loans, and structured finance. Many corporate banks offer transaction banking like trade finance, supply chain solutions, remittances, cash management and escrow services to their corporate customers. Corporate customers can also get facilities on investments like term deposits, mutual funds, and structured instruments. Corporate banks also offer treasury services like debt capital markets, forex and derivatives. To cater to corporate requirements, some corporate banks also offer value-added services, like cloud solutions, travel services, tax assistance, concierge services, and more.

Services and digitalization in corporate banking

The services in the corporate banks are value-intensive and tailored to suit the specific requirements of corporate customers. Following are the types of services that corporate banks provide to their customers.

  1. Corporate banks offer loans and other credit products to their customers to help their businesses expand
  2. It offers treasury services like debt capital markets, forex and derivatives and cash management services, and trade finance
  3. Corporate banks also offer equipment lending to help their customers grow their business
  4. Corporate banks also handle commercial real estate requirements and employee services

Digitalization in corporate banking – Corporate banks offer a bundle of services to their customers. They offer packaged offers to the employees of their corporate customers. The banks that serve both retail and corporate accounts, build mobile applications and based on their requirements offer tailored services to the customers. Through mobile applications, customers maintain their corporate accounts, apply for loans, invest in mutual funds and stock markets, apply for business and travel cards, and check the Forex market.

QA services in corporate banking

Corporate banking is more value intensive. As it caters to a specific customer segment, the products and services are more exclusive than services in retail banking. QA services in corporate banks are much more complicated than in retail banks. It does not follow the same line of services but customizes based on client requirements. Consider a scenario; the first payday, when companies are to credit the salary accounts of their employees. The performance requirements of banking systems will not be the same as all other days as there will be an immense load on banking systems due to their maximum usage on that particular day. There will be a delay in salary processing if the system faces performance issues. When banks opt to cater to their corporate clients, they must ensure system capability and sustainability on the days when the traffic is at its peak.

Corporate banks need quality assurance services to ensure that their systems are tenable during the days when customer traffic is high. In addition to checking the performance of banking systems in the corporate banks, it is also essential to check other quality aspects of the banking systems. Corporate accounts have distinctive features and do not follow the conventional line of retail services. As mentioned, banks customize corporate accounts based on clients’ requirements.

The corporate accounts are a mix of corporate and retail services. Hence, the applications require adequate validations. It is crucial to ensure that the systems’ elements of both the services are integrated without errors and working without any issues. It is also essential to check for the system’s security as it contains more than individual data like customer mutual fund details, investment records, loan details, and more. Corporate banking systems must also undergo thorough end-to-end testing to ensure seamless system performance.  

Ensuring the quality of corporate banking systems is equally important. Banks must strategize, plan, and prepare before the start of the test execution. Standard QA services of corporate accounts encompass validating customers’ lending platforms, trade and treasury accounts, digital platforms, and more.

  1. Requirements Assurance – The services in corporate banks are heterogeneous in nature and tailored to suit the specific requirements of customers. Requirement analysis of corporate banking systems is necessary to understand the requirements of the application under test.
  2. Integration Assurance – As there are multiple services bundled together it is also essential to validate the feature and functionality integration with the application suite and system landscape. The system integration ensures that all required functionalities are added to the applications and systems and work seamlessly.
  3. Functional Assurance – Since the functionalities in the corporate banking systems are diverse it is essential to validate the response of features and functionality. Based on the customers’ requirements it is critical to ensure that the added functionalities are working as per customer expectations.
  4. Non-Functional Assurance – As the corporate banks deal with valuable information maintaining the security of these corporate platforms is of the highest importance. The corporate banks’ systems might face security and performance issues. Quality assurance services remove performance bottlenecks and address the security issues of corporate bank accounts.
  5. Test Automation – The customer needs faster access to financial applications. But it is impossible to release financial applications in the market without thorough testing. For a data-intensive applications like financial apps automation testing is an easy solution. Automation testing significantly reduces time to market and money. It enhances accuracy and team productivity bringing the application nearer to customers faster.
  6. Regression Testing – Corporate banking applications undergo frequent changes in application functionality. Regression testing in the corporate banks is necessary to ensure that the existing application features remain unscathed with new additional changes.

Comparing QA services in retail and corporate banking

Even if on the surface, we do not see many differences in QA service for retail and corporate banks, there will be a significant underlying difference between the QA services of both banks. The systems in both banks require thorough end-to-end testing. Retail banks have a high volume of transactions, whereas corporate banks focus more on value. Performance testing for the systems in retail and corporate banks is essential, but in retail banks, the requirement is more intensive than in corporate banks.

Risk-based testing is important to validate the systems in both banks. But since corporate banks emphasize more on value, it is critical to maintain the risk index score matrix for corporate accounts. The systems in both the banks are validated based on the risk parameter like regulatory, financial impact, customer servicing, operations, and systems risk. For value-intensive accounts like corporate banks, the parameter of the risk score will be higher. Corporate banking handles many critical transactions, where the risk factor will always be on the medium to high scale as compared to retail banking, where the risk factor will be low to medium on the risk scale.

Since corporate banking combines several services to form a package, microservices testing is essential for corporate banking. Testing of corporate banking systems requires both banking and testing expertise to segregate between the intensity of test case scenarios. Corporate banking offers services like trade finance, supply chain finance, and more that require extensive testing to ensure error-free performance. The regulation impact is higher in corporate banking and testing corporate banking systems is tougher and impossible without adequate domain and testing knowledge. Corporate banking is more requirement based as compared to retail banking.

Retail and corporate banking both have a digital impact. Retail banks have undergone a digital transformation of their front-office and back-office processes. Whereas corporate banks are digitalizing their workflow in front-office, mid-office, and back-office processes. In the process of ensuring the security between value and volume, corporate banking has complex system architecture, which requires a specialized risk team to ensure the platform security.

Conclusion

Testing the systems in both banking segments requires specific knowledge about the platform, modules, and technologies used in retail and corporate banks. If a team has to execute testing for systems in either of these two banks or the exclusive part of the retail segment in corporate banks or exclusive corporate services in retail banks, they must have adequate knowledge to differentiate between the critical aspects of testing the systems in retail and corporate banks. 

At Yethi, we have a combined industry experience of more than 30 years. We have executed functional (functional acceptance, user acceptance, integration, regression, UI/UX) testing and non-function (performance, usability, security, data migration) across more than 22 countries globally. Our testing centre of excellence (TCoE) is formed with domain and testing experts who have successfully offered services and transformed business for more than 100+ clients.

Our 5th generation robotic test automation solution, Tenjin, can be integrated with a major banking platform. This intuition test automation solutions speed up your testing process, reducing time-to-market and money. Our QA services are a combination of tool-based and solution-based, always ensuring the quality of your banking platform.

Digital payment in the banking ecosystem and managing fraud risk

Countries believe there is unfathomable growth of digital payment in the banking  ecosystems. In fact, many countries are including the plan to boost the digital payment ecosystem in their budget report. India, for example, has a plan to offer financial support for the digital payment ecosystem, which is included in the Union Budget 2022-2023. As per a report in Statista, “total transaction value in the Digital Payments segment is projected to reach US$8.50tn in 2022.” The report further highlights that “total transaction value is expected to show an annual growth rate (CAGR 2022-2026) of 13.10% resulting in a projected total amount of US$13.91tn by 2026.”

Let us discuss some of the distinct global digital payment features. Digital payment allows instant money transfer between wallets and different bank accounts in seconds. It helps in easy bill payments, both prepaid and post-paid. Users can also manage physical and virtual card operations without any issues. Digital payment services help in easy merchant payments using contactless technologies like (NFC codes and QR code scanners). Digital payment platform uses multiple technologies like tokenization, passwords, biometrics, security questions, point-to-point encryption, out-of-band authentication, and one-time password (OTP) via SMS to protect digital transactions. A lot is happening in the digital payment platform, which requires strict attention to follow the security guidelines.

Background of digital payment

Organizations have seen the challenges associated with maintaining the platform security for the digital payment platform. The scope of digital payment is not the same as it was in the mid-1990s when Stanford Federal Credit Union offered the first online payment systems to clients as a first organization. Today, digital payment systems provide services in various fields. From money transfer to bill payment and loan origination, the digital payment platform handles multiple services.

Millicent and Ecash were the first companies to launch digital payment in 1995 and 1996, respectively. They specialize in digital cash, e-money, and tokens modes of digital payments. The emergence of PayPal in 1998 changed the digital payment trend completely.

Digital payment in the banking ecosystem

The massive technological development in today’s era has led to the growth in online shopping, banking, and other services. The digital payment structure has seen significant expansion in the past few years, and it is further accelerated with mobile devices. As per a report in Statista, 950 million users carried out mobile payment transactions globally in 2019. And the projection says there will be a whopping growth of 1.31 billion users by 2023. Amidst all these growth and developments, the organizations have much to worry about the platform security, performance, functionality, accessibility, and usability. Organizations must establish a strong foundation and control over the digital payment platform if they have to manage the unrelenting growth of digital payment.

To initiate and encourage the growth of digital payment, banks are embedding futuristic technologies like AI, Machine Learning, IoT, and Robotics with their products and solutions. Digital and contactless payment have increased in the recent past. Not just in the major cities, the smaller cities are also adopting contactless payments. Users can carry out transactions by simply scanning the QR codes or in a single swipe.

Banks are collaborating with multiple digital payment platforms and third-party platforms to extend their services beyond the conventional banking systems. The tap-and-go payment options have enabled many vendors and retailers to embed the advanced technology into wearable devices that allow consumers to purchase products and services using smartwatches, smart rings, and wristbands. The only concern is how secure these devices are. To put all speculations to rest, retailers and vendors are doing enough to ensure the platform’s security by eliminating anomalies and errors from the payment platforms.

There is an increase in e-commerce transactions. Restrictions on movement during the Covid-19 lockdown could be one of the reasons but are not the only one. Banks have made their services available to the customers on digital platforms before Covid-19. But we cannot take away the fact Covid-19 has fast-tracked the process, and whatever was brewing beneath the surface has emerged strongly. Digitalization has changed the payment structure. E-commerce sites today have access to the user’s bank accounts. Banks are also collaborating with e-commerce sites to provide exclusive offers to consumers. The process has influenced people to rely on e-commerce to purchase groceries, health products and other essentials. The offers from banks and the benefits and advantages of these transactions have surpassed conventional buying and selling behavior. Hence consumers prefer to shop online and access remote commerce and digital payments.

Customers have payment flexibility using QR codes. It is easy to implement and use. The banks have integrated the services and made them available to their customers. QR codes carry transaction processes without any hassles saving significant time. Investment banks are adopting cryptocurrency to help people inspire to invest in digital gold. The financial market has seen a prominent surge in crypto investment, and it is evident that cryptocurrency is here to stay.

Fraud risk in digital payment

The growth of digital payment attracts multiple fraud risks as hackers are trying to gain access to customers’ personal and banking details. Following are the types of fraud risks that banks and customers are facing on a regular basis.

  1. Phishing – The scammers create identical bank website and send the links to the customers. The fake websites are used to capture user ID and passwords, Card numbers, ATM PIN, CVV, and OTP and misuse them.
  2. Vishing – It is a simple method where scammers use Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology to contact customers and seek personal and financial details over the phone.
  3. Smishing – Using this method scammers send text messages to the customers with links to call back, visit websites, download documents, and information about job offers, lottery wins, ATM deactivated and more.
  4. Identity Theft – Scammers use different methods to acquire customer personal information date of birth, passport number, Aadhaar details, PAN details and more to access customer bank accounts and carry out transactions.
  5. Sim Swap Fraud – The scammers obtain customers’ detail through phone calls, messages, and more and get a new Sim card issued in customers’ names to carry out illegal transactions.
  6. Social Engineering Fraud – The scammers update fake number that resembles bank toll-free number on various digital platforms or caller identification apps to deceive customers. 
  7. International Transfer Scams – The scammers create fake stories and trap customers to share their personal and bank details. They use this information to withdraw a large sum of amount from customers’ bank accounts.
  8. Money Mule – This method is used to entice customers with attractive commissions. Once customers share their bank account details and personal information, the amount which is already stolen from one account to transferred to the customers’ account.  
  9. Juice Jacking – The scammers install the malware in public charging ports. If the customers do not have their own charging device and they happen to charge their mobile devices in any of the public charging ports, scammers can get easy access to the customers’ details stored in the mobile phones.
  10. Cerberus Trojan Threat – It is malware that steals customers’ banking details like credit card numbers, CVV and more. Cerberus efficiently captures screenshots, and get easy access to SMS text, contact lists, account credentials, and more.
  11. Covid-19 Phishing Threat – Covid-19 has been used by many scammers as an opportunity to steal and manipulate customers’ personal data and financial details bank account and debit/credit card details, CVV numbers and secret passwords to gain access to customers’ bank accounts.
  12. IDN Homograph Attack – The scammers can create and use a domain or website name that resembles an established name to trick the customers.
  13. Loan Fraud – The scammers trick the customers by publishing fake advertisements for quick and easy loans and offer them low-interest rates, easy repayment, or without any security needs.
  14. Online scams through the classified marketplace – The scammers create a fake profiles with fake social media addresses to contact customers who post their advertisements. They trick the customers to share their personal and financial details.
  15. Aadhar-based Payment System Fraud – The scammers can use the gums and glues to replicate customers’ fingerprints and use them to carry out transactions.
  16. Broadband Internet Security Fraud – The scammers may call customers to pretend that they are calling from telecommunication or internet services companies and ask for customers’ banking and personal details.
  17. SMS Spoofing – The scammers may call or text customers informing them about the KYC process being incomplete, debit and credit card being blocked or expired, SIM cards expired, accounts credited with a significant and more.

Managing fraud risk

The digital payment platforms need a high fraud detection mechanism. It is critical to have security measures, but it is also crucial to ensure the platform is functioning without any errors. Digital payment platforms must adopt a few security measures to establish a secure connection in a high-speed transaction process. Every secure website must have SSL certificates as it creates a foundation of trust. HTTPS is safe compared to HTTP as it avoids redirection links. It requires a digital certificate to establish the website as safe and secured, and HTTPS websites have security certificates.

The digital era is all about real-time payments, and the digital payment platform is driven by technology. Considering the amount of fraud in digital payment, fraud checks, authentication, authorizations, and data analysis must happen simultaneously. Banks are improving the API ecosystems to integrate their services into the third-party platform and make them available to the customers. As in the real-time payment, the sender and the receiver send and receive the amount at the same time; it is crucial to have the notification and alert of all transactions in place to limit the chances of data manipulations.

The digital payment platform is customer-centric; hence it must be customer friendly. Customers would not want to be pinned by unnecessary compliance requirements. But digital payment platforms cannot be open to cyber threats. Hence, the platform must follow the necessary security guidelines without overdoing them. In today’s world, digital payment platform follows blockchain technologies and are visible to the customer. This technology helps in detecting illegal transactions and malicious user behavior. Organizations are investing in technologies to tighten security knots and prevent monetary losses. Companies would not compromise on external and internal security.

As important as it is to maintain the security of the digital payment platform, it is also critical to test the platform end-to-end for seamless functionalities and error-free performance. Without an adequate testing solution, the platform would miss out on important alerts.

Conclusion

It is crucial to create a tenable cybersecurity framework and it is also important to ensure the integration, performance, accessibility, and usability of this framework. Organizations must adapt to digital channels and platforms to retain their customers. Digitalization is making it easier for organizations to acquire customers and serve them digitally. Accessing funds and payments is becoming more convenient.

The organizations need support to promote and build products with the right features and capabilities. The banks see growth in their ROI when the people use these digital platforms. Organizations would witness a significant cost reduction in delivery when people use the platform for many years. Digital payment testing is a method to validate the platforms’ sustainability and tenacity for long years.

User experience is the most vital point as the users’ attention span is less, and any unsatisfactory designs would bring down their interest leading to the lowering of companies’ investments. The usability and accessibility of the digital platforms are the parts that the organizations must focus on. Testing the platform ensures customer experience with the UI design, platform usability, and accessibility. We have seen clients coming back with requests to understand if their application performances are consistent across multiple devices and operating systems. As banks are slowly moving to multi-channel from mono-channel, which means that banks are interacting with their customers and offering services on multiple channels. Hence, integration, performance, functionality, and security are the most essential areas that require adequate validation.

There is a significant growth in API channels as in Yethi, we have witnessed several instances where banks had requested upward of a thousand APIs to their partner networks. Our partners have contacted us to build an infrastructure that could validate the APIs. The CIOs may face challenges if somebody releases a patch set in a multiple-interconnected network, which could lead to disruption of ongoing processes. The banks need to ensure their reputation as any of these instances could cause heavy damage to their business flow.

Transaction Banking Evolution and Testing

Transaction banking plays a significant role in the functioning of corporate and banking institutions to allow a smooth and safe flow of cross-border transactions, trade financial deals, mitigation of risks, cash flow management services, and security services. Transaction banking improves the relationship between banks, customers, and partners. It offers treasury solutions allowing a safer, secured, and effective flow of cash and financial securities across the international financial systems. It facilitates trade finance and offers cash flow management and securities for public and private entities.

The services of transaction banking are cash management services, online services, trade finance, and security services. Cash management service is a part of transaction banking that entities offer as a solution to manage the cash inflow and outflow effectively. Through online services, transaction banking provides a single point of cash access, trade, and security services to help streamline the workflow process for corporate, institutions, and small-medium enterprises. Transaction banking services for trade finance offer a range of global trade finance deals, including import and export services, buyer and seller financing, and open account receivable management. Through security services, transaction banking aims to improve the services and relationships between banks, clients, and partners.

In this article, we will explore why there is a surge of technology and innovation in transaction banking. We will track the evolution of transaction banking and highlight the business and regulatory issues. We will also investigate the scope of testing the transaction modules in banks and examine the products that are covered in testing the transaction modules and platforms.

Technology and Innovation in Transaction Banking

There is stiff competition in transaction banking that arises with changes in the regulatory compliances. With changes in regulatory requirements, banks and vendors are making considerable investments to remain competitive and ensure the quality of transaction banking platforms.

The banks no longer build their proprietary solutions. Instead, they rely on technology vendors to deliver corporate solutions. It significantly reduces costs and frees the internal resources to focus on more value-added services. Banks are investing to make the data easily available to companies and help them achieve straight-through reconciliation. Banks are focusing on collaborating with external vendors for payments. Mobile payment systems are emerging which is evident from different mobile payment platforms collaborating with Google, MasterCard, and Sprint.

Transaction banking is changing the relationship between banks and their technology vendors. Banks are improving their collaboration with the technology vendors to ensure that they offer quality banking services to the customers. Banks are utilizing the technology to the fullest to make their services flexible. With the inclusion of mobile technologies and Cloud services, banks are evolving and improving their services; banking services without these recent technologies now seem incomplete.

Evolution in Transaction Banking

Banks have reorganized their internal operation to improve different transaction banking units. The current structure unifies cash management and trade finance activities. The evolution of transaction banking has had a significant impact on the banks’ service lines. The quality of products and services like trade finance, payments, supply chain, cash management, liquidity management and more are now improved with the technology used for transaction banking.

Large corporations are using the effect of globalization on the economy to manage their cash and liquidity. They have standardized their finance processes by creating regional shared service centres and executing centralized back-office systems across regions. The earlier payment factories that used to process payments have now evolved into extensive corporate transaction banking systems utilized to manage the transaction flow between the partners, banks, and clients. Technology has helped corporates to manage and use their internal cash flow more efficiently. They have improved the visibility of cash transactions. But one area that can be challenging for treasury is to gain access of the cash once it is identified.

The situation can be grave in the countries where there are some rules imposed on tax. It prevents the easy movement of liquidity outside of the country. To facilitate this movement there are many large cash management banks present across countries that advise their clients and leverage the network to offer them value-added services. It offers greater visibility to the corporate treasurer over their cash status. They can manage the cash movement and access the cash without being worried about adverse situations. The organizations can reduce the need for short-term borrowings by up to 30-40%.

Working capital is extremely important for organizations since the liquidity risks can turn an organization into bankruptcy and counterparty risk is rising high. It is not just enough to have funds for a corporate they must manage the funds to make it more accessible and visible.

Liquidity Risk & Counterparty Risk

Liquidity risk and counterparty risk are the two common types of risk that transaction banking face. When an individual investor, business, or financial institution cannot meet their short-term debt, it raises the concern of liquidity risk. On the other hand, counterparty risk arises when the second party in credit, trading & transaction, and investment cannot fulfil their role in the deal and becomes a defaulter in a contract. An effective liquidity risk management and counterparty risk management program help banks meet their obligations to pay within due dates to avoid adverse scenarios.

The Scope of Testing Transaction Banking

The scope of testing transaction banking is spread across the area of its services. The service line of transaction banking is the flow of cross-border transactions, trade financial deals, mitigation of risks, cash flow management services, and security services. The scope of testing transaction banking includes testing the cash management, payment transactions, supply chain finance, collection and receivables, trade finance, and back and front office transaction banking modules.

Transaction banking is available through multiple sources and channels. Testing transaction banking includes testing the transaction origination medium like bank branches (back office and front office systems) and channels (internet and mobile).

Yethi’s Testing Approach and Methodologies

At Yethi, we have worked with some of the major national and international banks. We have tested prominent transaction banking applications. From User Acceptance test design & execution to regression testing and performance testing, we have conducted end-to-end testing of different transaction modules. We have also executed security testing of all the transaction banking applications.

We have tested the following modules,

  1. Payments
    1. NEFT/ RTGS/IMPS
    1. Bulk Transfers
    1. A2A Transactions
    1. UPI/NACH-based transactions
    1. Instrument Series
    1. Tax Payments
    1. ECS
    1. Products Maintenance
  2. Supply chain Finance
    1. Vendor Finance
    1. Dealer Finance
    1. Payable Finance
    1. Receivable Finance
    1. PO Finance
    1. Reverse Factoring
    1. Export Factoring
  3. Collection and Receivables
    1. Collections
    1. EOD BOD Reports
    1. Receivables
    1. All other Reports
  4. Trade Finance
    1. Bill Collection,
    1. Letters of Credit,
    1. Bank Guarantee
    1. Open Account for Trade,
    1. C2C Transactions for Trade
    1. B2C transactions for Trade

We follow strategic testing methodologies and execute testing in phases across different modules like Payments, Supply Chain Finance, Collections and Receivables, and Trade Finance. Our testing method includes identifying various business processes in the bank and customizing software based on the volume and value of transactions supported by each process.

Our testing focuses on the processes deemed to be at high risk, based on an algorithm built in conjunction with the bank. We design and execute test cases based on our analysis. We offer end-to-end and improved test coverage across all the modules and products in transaction banking. We help banks in identifying the defects at the early stage, thereby minimizing the defect leakage risk. We detect rare issues and errors and increase the overall productivity of the application.

Mambu – A comparative study with other prominent CBS platforms

There has been a progressive shift from Banks and FIs towards more nimble and agile digital platforms, this facilitates them being more effective and efficient in the ways to serve their customer whilst allowing them to be more flexible in rolling out new products and services.

Mambu focuses on offering Banks and FIs a seamless online banking experience. Mambu is a SaaS-based Core Banking Platform that puts digital customer experience at the core of its banking and lending solutions.

Being born in the Cloud “Mambu” is created to empower the banking and financial industry with digital-first technology making the platform easily implementable. It started its journey by offering services to microfinance institutions and fintech start-ups. Mambu was founded in 2011, and today, 478 organizations in 51 global countries have adopted Mambu as their Core Banking Solution.  The latest offering includes corporate lending and payment services as well.

In this article, we will compare Mambu with other prominent CBS platforms.

Mambu vs Temenos Transact

Temenos being rich in its offering of system functionality and built with relevant technology offers a diverse range of integrations with ancillary systems. The platform is built for retail, corporate, and private banks to manage transactions, risk, enterprise credit, and more. It caters to the customer profiles like retail, corporate, universal, private, Islamic, and microfinance & community banks. Temenos solutions include Temenos Infinity – Digital Front Office, Temenos T24 Transact – Core Banking, Temenos Payments, Temenos Infinity Wealth, and Temenos Fund Management.

In comparison, Mambu is fairly a new core banking solution. Nevertheless, is growing fast to be a preferred partner for Banks on the lookout for their Core banking transformation. Mambu association with top-notch organizations to help them design, launch and scale digital-first banking and lending services. It is a platform built from the Cloud upward and is proving to be a cost-efficient alternative to expensive and complex conventional core banking solutions.

Being on the Cloud is one of the benefits among all others. Mambu also provides tools to its customers to build, integrate, and launch all lending portfolios. Its customer profile includes p2p, marketplace personnel, SME lenders, deposit-taking institutions, and mobile banking providers. The Mambu solutions are Composable banking, Cloud banking platform, and Mambu Process Orchestrator.

Mambu vs FLEXCUBE

FLEXCUBE has been a great option for the Banks and FI’s alike due to its association with CITI in the initial days and now after being owned by Oracle. It has front-to-back digital capabilities that help banks and financial institutions to innovate and create next-generation technologies for digital customer experiences. FLEXCUBE helps in generating improved insights and enhancing STP as it has access to advanced automation tools, which are supported by MI capabilities.

In contrast to Mambu’s customer profile, FLEXCUBE’s customer profile includes Universal, direct, private, and Islamic banks, and financial and lending institutions. Also, FLEXCUBE has been empowering the business of their customers with the solutions like Core banking software, Enterprise limits, Collateral Management, Investor Servicing, Financial Services Lending and Leasing.

Mambu vs TCS BaNCS

TCS BaNCS solutions focus on Digital First, Cloud First philosophy to support the fast-paced digital world. The TCS BaNCS product suite is developed to help financial services institutions become more agile, innovative, and intelligent by leveraging the cloud and digital ecosystems. Its Global Banking Platform offers business support with products and services across assets and liabilities, cash, securities, and crypto-assets. While Legacy systems struggle with the accelerating growth of digitalization. It empowers the overall ecosystem with a rich catalogue of APIs.

Mambu is used by the Credit Union and multi-branch set-up. It is used for online banking, retail banking, and private banking. Like Mambu, TCS BaNCS also supports multi-branch setups and Credit Union. In addition to online banking, retail banking, and private banking, TCS BaNCS can be used for Compliance Tracking, Corporate Banking, Credit Card Management, Investment Banking, Risk Management, Securities Management, and Transaction Monitoring. In the banking category, TCS BFSI platforms have 534 customers in 48 countries, while Mambu is implemented by 478 customers in 51 countries.

Mambu vs Finserv DNA

DNA® from Fiserv is a Core Banking Solution with an open architecture. It offers a wide range of customization and enhancement options through the DNAcreator® toolkit and AppMarketTM. DNA enables easy integration and customization; and as it is based on open architecture, it offers flexibility to add third-party or customize the platform to suit your requirements. DNA improves operational flexibility by enabling real-time data backup. It delivers real-time performance by executing and storing transactions as they occur.

Real-time data performance ensures the information is updated consistently to support rapid data analysis. DNA offers an enhanced user experience with intuitive and touch-enabled features. The improved user interface allows ease of use and improves efficiency for users across various devices and OSes. DNA is fully integrated with corporate banking solutions that empower all banking operations. In banking categories, Finserv DNA has 100 customers in 6 countries in contrast to 478 customers in 51 countries for Mambu.

Mambu’s SaaS model supports tier-one banks to fintech start-ups. It is developed from the cloud unlike other core banking solutions. DNA has a TransactionExpress feature that helps users with quick multiple transactions. It also allows multiple transactions to multiple accounts from a single screen. DNA teller capture option and allows users to image, process, balance and verify checks and other documents immediately — right at the teller line – to gain quick access to external funds without handling a transaction more than once. Mambu and Finserv both have component-based architecture, but as per a Gartner report compared to Finserv, Mambu has better interoperability and functional granularity.  

Mambu vs FIS Profile

FIS designs and implements a fully integrated core system with critical components to transform existing investment in the community, mid-tier, large and global financial institutions. It aims at meeting customer needs, regulatory changes, and competing with alternative providers. FIS is the main repository of data used for financial management and reporting functions. The functions of FIS are, to record financial transactions in GLs, generating financial reports to meet management & statutory requirements, and control overall spending through budgetary control embedded in the systems.

As per a Gartner Peer report, Mambu wins an edge over FIS in terms of interoperability and functional granularity. The report also reveals that Mambu has better experience compared to FIS while catering to Small, Midsize, and Large Bank Segments. Mambu can be easily integrated and deployed as compared to FIS. In terms of quality of end-user training and ease of integration using standard APIs and tools, Mambu is a clear winner.

Mambu vs SAP Transactional Banking

SAP Transactional Banking for SAP S/4HANA is an open core banking platform designed for retail and corporate banking and based on an architecture that ensures real-time processing and continuous availability. It provides a wide range of functions for retail and corporate banks of different sizes; and enables users to manage the contract-related master data, along with maintaining, controlling, and monitoring the use of collaterals.

It defines integration patterns for connecting to a payment transaction system, a collateral management system, or a sub-ledger system, archiving the relevant business objects, automating the manual processing tasks, and mapping the relationships between receivables, and collateral assets, collateral providers, and collateral assignees. Its features include exception handling, data protection, up and downstream integration, data lifecycle management, and archiving capability.

Mambu SaaS model supports both tier-one banks along with fintech start-ups. Being cloud up, unlike other core banking solutions.

Mambu vs Avaloq Banking Suite

Avaloq is a Swiss-based leader in core banking software and digital technology founded in 1985. They provide SaaS and business process as a service (BPaaS) solutions to banks and wealth managers. With a strength of over 150 clients with USD 4.5 trillion in assets managed with their flagship software product. Their default approach is cloud-native, offering flexible deployment options for core banking.  Their standalone digital products are also cloud-native and cloud-agnostic, enabling efficient operation on any private or public cloud.

Avaloq helps in wealth and investment management by offering specialized knowledge and software to clients. They leverage automation to manage, protect and grow wealth and help private banks by bringing flexibility to their offerings. Avaloq is designed for retail and commercial banks by operating a traditional branch network and boosting online services with a fully digital experience. It also offers tailored services for challengers & neo banks by speeding up business launches. It uses cloud-based solutions to scale up business processes faster.

As per Gartner Market reviews, Avaloq and Mambu both have 4.2 ratings. While Avaloq wins an edge over Mambu serving the Midsize Bank Segment, Mambu is ideal for Small Bank Segment. However, Mambu wins by .1 in interoperability and functional granularity. Mambu serves the Large Bank Segment, while Avaloq could not make it through. Avaloq has a better requirement understanding and pricing flexibility. But Mambu offers ease of deployment, quality end-user training, and ease of integration using standard APIs and tools. Mambu also has easy availability of 3rd party resources. Compared to Avaloq, Mambu offers quality technical support, while Avaloq has a quality peer user community.

Mambu vs Intellect Global Universal Banking

Intellect is a popular financial platform for Corporate Banking, Retail Banking, Brokerage Solution, Treasury Management, and Insurance Software. It helps banks and businesses to grow in their wealth. Intellect is designed for transaction banking and supports corporate banking & global payments to grow their business. Intellect is a highly rated practice management solution that can handle billing, scheduling, and multiple automated tasks.

Mambu, on the other hand, is the world’s only SaaS banking platform that helps banks evolve by offering future-ready technology. Mambu is designed for banking convenience by simplifying plugin integrations, streamlining, and automating customer journeys. With Mambu, there is no need for coding and customizing as it has an option to configure and integrate, and Mambu is good to be used. It is used on the cloud instead of on-prem deployments, which helps organizations to constantly improve instead of being stuck into a painful cycle of enduring major and disruptive releases. It is interesting to note that as per a report, Intellect is ranked 10th while Mambu is ranked 4th in Core Banking Software.

Mambu vs Finacle Core Banking Software

Finacle is a cloud-based banking solution that helps financial institutions to digitally enhance their core banking capabilities. Developed by Infosys, the platform is used by banks across 100+ countries and serves 1 billion end customers worldwide.

Finacle offers a comprehensive set of products that accelerates organizational growth with innovation. It has open APIs, embedded with customer insights, and a real-time processing engine making it an ideal choice for modern banking. Finacle is a highly modular solution designed to speed up the production of new products and accelerate digital adoption. It delivers faster, safer, and fully personalized core banking services.

When compared to Mambu, Finacle’s customer profile is spread across retail, corporate, universal, community, and Islamic banks; lending and payment providers, while Mambu has alternative lenders (p2p, marketplace personal and SME lenders), deposit-taking institutions, and mobile banking providers. Mambu solutions are composable banking, cloud banking platform, and Mambu process orchestrator. Finacle has corporate, retail, universal, community banking suites, payments connect, and a digital engagement hub.

Wrapping up – Mambu has come a long way standing its ground and competing with some of the top names in the Core Banking space, but its journey so far has been remarkable and something that needs to be noted. Mambu has been successful in finding its own place and supporting Banks and FIs on their digitization journey in such a short span of time.

To conclude, Mambu is successful in standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the established names in the BFSI domain.