Ongoing Innovation in Retail Banking

The banking industry has been transitioning for more than a decade. Pandemic might have put human life at a standstill, but it has spurred innovation even more. Innovation is constant, and whatever has been brewing and were supposed to be out in upcoming years have made its appearance even stronger.

The financial and banking sectors have taken enormous risks out of bare necessity to move past the remote working environment and release innovative financial products in the market to meet customer expectations. The digital transformation is accelerated in banks and financial institutions based on customer requirements.

Organizations are using different tools that are readily available for building new digital platforms but were never used before. Even though this unprecedented situation has accelerated the growth of the digital platform, still some organizations feel that they are far behind in innovation and digital transformation. To overcome the challenge of preventing economic depression owing to the prevailing circumstances, the financial and banking sectors are more drawn toward creating a stronger foundation of digital transformation.

In the following years, the economic impact on the banking industry is probably vague and unpredictable. But the role that innovation is likely to play and transpire the digital transactions cannot be ruled out. Hence, it is definite to keep investing in creating an innovative product range to meet customer expectations or even exceed them.

Undoubtedly, the pandemic situation has provided a threat to the industry. But it has also provided an opportunity to invent and improve technologies and help organizations realize their potential in terms of digital growth. It will allow the financial industry to cater to its customer requirements even during hard times.

Fear of the spread of Covid has restricted all contact. Hence, the contactless or no-contact operation is urging banks and financial institutions to innovate transactions solution across key business areas. Following are the innovations that the financial and banking sectors are focusing on currently and will continue to do so going forward.

Innovations for contactless transactions

With significantly reduced footfall in the banks, personal banking is now elevated to digital banking encourages hassle-free and contactless transactions across all digital platforms. With fewer in-branch operational activities, consumers no longer have to visit the branch to meet their needs. During a time of dire necessity, financial institutions unleashed their full potential to win their customer’s confidence.

Digital customer onboarding – The innovative digital customer onboarding process enables you to register your customers online over an inventive digital platform.

Video KYC – Video KYC is an innovative technique where the customer’s documents are validated and verified through a mobile video conversation between the banker and customers.

Contactless payments – With a new norm of no-contact or contactless being the practice, consumers are opting to minimize physical contact. Using facial and voice recognition customers are using payments, ATMs, and business correspondent-enabled banking transactions.

Virtual customer service – Not just payments and transactions, a bank needs to address other requirements and complaints of their clients. Enterprises are now incorporating enhanced bots with their service websites. Contact centres are virtualized through cloud-based systems.

Redefine banking experience – With limited human and physical interaction, the banks are further adding value to their services. There is a significant emphasis on technologies such as virtual and augmented reality.

Technologies that enable remote working

Improving Employee Access – Since the “work-from-home” option is unlikely to end anytime soon, financial institutions are vying for productivity enhancement. To standardize the workforce industries are replicating office-like environments by implementing robust, distributed, and secured setup for uninterrupted operations. A cloud-based solution is flexible enough to track the volatility of financial transactions.

Enhancing Employee Productivity – The older tools may be obsolete when it comes to catering to the need of employees during this tiring time. Understanding the situation, organizations are implementing AI-based productivity enhancement tools to predict human behaviour, track performance, and identify development areas. Further, the organizations are introducing learning and training programmes remotely to improve their employee productivity, they are reaping maximum benefits from AR and VR technology.

 Technologies to track employees’ physical and psychological well-being

There is no doubt that the pandemic had created quite a stir, taking a toll on the physical, emotional, and psychological health of people. To maintain the balance, organizations took corrective and preventive measures such as no-contact attendance, monitoring the temperature of employees and video-based conference meetings. Employees also opted for virtual medical assistance to ensure physical and psychological well-being. The trend proved successful and likely to continue for the years to come.

Technologies to reclaim economic growth

The current condition retarded economic growth and severely affected a few key business areas. With the help of technical innovations, financial institutions are making all possible efforts to retrieve from an economic downturn and offer services and solutions to their customers.

Customized Financial Product – The years 2020 & 2021 have exposed lending and banking services to business uncertainty and risk. The retail banks have customized solutions to meet customer needs. Customized products allowed organizations to identify solutions and monitor risk.

Monitoring and Evaluating Assets – The travel restriction posed challenges to evaluating and monitoring assets. Organizations used IoT-based systems to evaluate assets remotely. With this solution, financial institutions could evaluate and monitor products such as trade and lease financing, asset maintenance financing, and manufacturing and infrastructure financing.

Innovative Risk Assessment – The concurrent situation has led to business uncertainties. Calculating risk based on the traditional form of obtaining data may no longer be reliable. Financial institutions are relying on AI & ML -enabled models, which could help in creating an early warning system to monitor risk. Risk assessment of customer data through this technique enabled the organizations to understand customers’ creditworthiness.

Transaction Exchange – By integrating APIs of one financial institution with another, organizations could offer supply chain financing, marketplace lending, and POS-based lending products to their partners. It improved underwriting, pricing, and collections by tapping into the cash inflow of small and medium enterprises.

Changes in Retail Banking

  1. Innovations were moving at a slower pace, but the sudden outbreak of the global pandemic caught many industries off-guard
  2. Before the situation, many organizations were still holding onto traditional ways of catering to their customer requirements
  3. In-house and personal banking was the standard operations for many retail banks until they discovered that digital platforms can be an option

How did the retail banks deal with the changes?

  • Speeding up digital innovation – There were several digital innovations, which were lying in the pipeline to be released in upcoming years. Enterprises were already investing in the technologies in hope that they would bear fruits in the future. The challenge has pre-ponded the release, speeding up the digital innovations. Customers are relying more on digital banking and contactless interaction, which is reducing the footfall in the branches. Smart banking solutions such as video KYC and virtual banking have gained prominence now.
  • Reorganizing branch banking strategy – During 2020 & 2021, some of the banks had to decide on closing a few of their branches. Before Covid, banks relied on branch banking. They had greater dependencies on branch banking, which were reduced during the pandemic situation. Bank branches shutting down at a faster rate across the world has pushed decision-makers to reorganize their branch banking strategies.
  • Reforming customer services – Banks need to cater to their customer requirements, with or without limits. Before the critical time, customers relied more on in-branch banking. With lockdown being imposed globally and restrictions in the movement have led people to depend more on contactless transactions, giving a boost to digitalization. Digitalization allowed the organizations to facilitate no-contact banking for their customers.
  • Revisiting operating models – Banking operations used to heavily rely on manual effort. Driven by the current scenario, the financial sector is steadily moving towards digitalization. To address customer requirements, banking sectors identified opportunities. They simplified the banking operation process by automating the process and lowering operating expenses. Banks also introduced digital solutions to monitor and manage the remotely working workforce.

Initiatives taken by banks during the critical time and continued thereafter

There was a tremendous impact on financial growth, globally. To bounce back from this financial debacle, banks needed to consider short-term as well as long-term strategies. For banks had to yield profitable growth and had to focus on long-term strategies. Below are some of the initiatives that the banks are taking to ensure their financial stability.

  1. Cost optimization

Cost optimizing ensures growth and sustainability. To prevent further financial loss during the challenging time, the organization planned methodically to adapt to cost-cutting measures and took bold steps towards cost reformation. However, several complexities arise during the tedious time, and the effect was much more adverse than anticipated. The same methods that worked during other times did not work during this time.

In 2020 & 2021, 77% of the organizations implemented cost containment as a best business practice of maintaining expense levels by preventing unnecessary spending. It helped in reducing expenses and improving profitability without risking long-term damage to the company. 65% of the companies cancelled planned investments, 48% changed their financial plans, while 5% refrain from taking any financial actions because of restrictions. 26% of the companies changed their merger and acquisition strategy, and 40% adjusted guidance.

  • Re-designing the business continuity process

With social distancing, banks needed more innovative technologies to ensure smooth services for customers. The banking and financial sectors have various touchpoints, branches, support operations, ATMs, call centres and more. The criticalities of this situation compelled BFSI sectors to manage their touchpoints while adhering to social distancing guidelines. However, there was still a need to control the spread of the pandemic. This facilitated banks to adopt and deploy new technologies. The retail banks are developing and implementing new SOPs to ease in-branch and remote (digital) banking operations.

Branches must serve their customers while ensuring social distancing, but surely there are challenges in the focus business areas. Organizations are initiated the following ways to take care of their customer needs, without affecting their business flow.

  • Reducing branch and ATM footfall by encouraging the use of mobile banking
  • Cash management and technology support minimized ATM downtimes
  • Operations promoting digital platforms and transactions to the customers
  • Bank operation teams are using bots, and IVR (interactive voice response) to address customer queries related to loan moratorium, charges, product features, credit cards and branch appointments
  • Setting up goals to increase volumes and adjust staffing models
  • Redefining SOPs and service-level agreements (SLAs) for smooth internal operations
  • Adopting technologies which remained unutilized for long
  • Distributing workloads across operational sites
  • Digital transformation

As digital platforms evolved, organizations embraced digitalization to allow contactless sales, services and customer-employee, employer-employee interactions and more.

The journey of digital transformation may have started a few years ago, but the Covid crisis has accelerated the entire process. Digital transformation is not just handling the challenge, but it is likely to play a major role during post-Covid recovery. With digitalization being felt everywhere, both urban and rural part is slowly gaining access to data as well as gaining high mobile penetration. To cater to their customers remotely or in-branch, banks are creating new digital solutions to enable digital banking for them.

  • Banks are now leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), including natural language processing and emotional recognition capabilities across various customer touchpoint
  • Driving salesforce digitally to generate sales within the work-from-home option
  • Identifying potential FinTech partners in various categories such as payments, onboarding, credit underwriting and collections, and partnering with them quickly to enable contactless services
  • Investing a high share in the digitalization of the marketing budget
  • Applying digital transformation to improve customer experience and encouraging remote collaborative working
  • Improving data and cybersecurity measures, which are the principal need of digital transformation for customers and employees

  • Productivity

Ideally in a crisis like the current one, there could be a possibility that the organization might have to compromise on employee productivity. Organizations need a better crisis-management system to manage the concurrent situation. Hence organizations created innovative solutions, one such solution is digital transformation across all key operational and business areas. Banks are looking for new initiatives to drive the workforce and enhance productivity during this Pandemic. A few of these initiatives are mentioned below.

  • To focus more on digital and automated options to develop capabilities
  • Strictly monitoring lead management system to reduce effort leakage
  • Taking advantage of data analytics support to boost productivity
  • Defining workflows by activities by re-designing business process
  • To cater to unconventional business demands, organizations utilized workflow management tools
  • To define the Key Result Areas (KRA) and Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for ownership and responsibility of the workload, organizations are using performance monitoring tools
  • To improve sales and services amidst this pandemic and its restrictions, organizations deployed digital tools for employees to access
  • Following the strict SLAs, enterprises applied ring-fencing to review the scope of segregating non-essential services and outsourcing them to vendors
  • To further enhance the skills of their employees, enterprises designed online training modules
  • Handling online communication with all stakeholders even during the ongoing crisis
 
  • Asset-lite operating model

The fixed costs can be reduced by shifting to an asset-lite model. With a larger focus on digital platforms and remote working, the enterprises function without disrupting the business and services.

  • Making the customer-employee interaction easy with the right digital assets
  • Providing support for the workforce working remotely
  • Analyzing different specialized services and non-value services and accordingly outsourcing them
  • It also helped in utilizing footprint and optimizing real estate  

Adopting an asset-lite operating model lowers recurring fixed costs like rentals, lower support, and maintenance costs, direct connection with customers, higher utilization of self-service platforms and easier compliance with standards/regulations.

  • Planning business strategies

Businesses had to bounce back from the economical setback post-Covid. It was even more challenging to keep up during this crisis. Banks cut down the expenses on non-essential parts that no longer serve them. They planned different approaches due to their low lending capabilities, low-interest income, and increase stressed assets. Banks’ approaches and initiatives are different now. A few of those initiatives are as mentioned below:

  • Changing business models based on customers’ financial needs, products, and channels as well as adapting and analyzing new customer requirements
  • Customizing services by ring-fencing for prospective customers
  • Building brand image to gain customer loyalty
  • Considering wider requirements and scenarios to build a resilience plan
  • Building strategies around new products, services, and channels to capture new market segments
  • Assessing intra-industry collaborations for sales and services

Innovation in Quality Assurance

Quality Assurance is an inseparable aspect of the banking and financial industry. Enterprises decided to innovate in testing to speed up the process. Currently, the testing process in banks and financial institutions follows DevOps – Agile methodologies. They have included continuous testing along with continuous integration and continuous deployment.

The financial and the banking sector shifts to digital quality assurance with a high emphasis on automating the testing process wherever possible and holds applicable to accelerate their digital transformation journey. Banks are confidently adopting the open-source testing platform and AI-based testing to speed up the time to market and reduce the cost and effort. AI components focus on advanced test automation that saves time and enhances accuracy in the digital testing process. It is a self-healing automation process that produces more reliable outcomes. It helps in writing the test scripts and analyzing the large datasets faster. AI-based testing tools minimize future defects in applications by predicting instead of detecting them.

Enterprises are likely to adapt to both offshore and onsite testing models based on their specific requirements. If an organization can set up an in-house testing architecture to execute the testing projects, an onsite testing model would be advisable for them. However, if they are reluctant to invest in in-house testing, they can opt for offshore testing models. Whether offshore or onsite, both can be equally beneficial for a bank and financial institutions if the testing partner has the competency to execute end-to-end testing with expected results.  

Conclusion –

Yethi is a niche QA services provider with years of experience delivering high-quality testing projects. We have worked with 100+ clients across 22+ countries and executed end-to-end testing services across all the major core banking applications with functional areas like core banking, payments, lending, and more. Our quality assurance services include functional testing (user acceptance, functional acceptance, system integration, regression, UI/UX), non-functional testing (usability, performance, security, data migration), and testing advisory services.

Our testing centre of excellence is a team of highly experienced testing & domain specialists who understand the processes and technologies involved in digital projects & quickly scale capacity to meet the needs of your business. We have a test repository of 850K+ reusable assets built with highly probable test cases and scenarios in the financial and banking sector.

Our 5th generation robotic codeless test automation tool, Tenjin, is built with intuitive features and supports our QA services. It is a fast and scalable test automation platform and works flawlessly across multiple applications to provide accurate test results.

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.