Today’s economic and competitive landscape is making the status quo unsustainable for the banking world. Additionally, the macroeconomic plummet brought along by the pandemic continues to burden the industry’s bottom line, with very little anticipation of a turnaround anytime in the near future. This inevitable transition to a digital space, thus, is not only lowering entry barriers but is also driving bold transformations by the incumbents.  

In an industry that has thrived on face-to-face human interactions and loyalty, why digital? 

Firstly, digital banking is always open. Complaining about banking hours and spending your Saturdays fixing your bank accounts are truly things of the past. With an uninhibited and fast access to your account and processes, digital banking is no doubt a massive convenience in disguise. On the other hand, adopting digital banking has helped financial institutions spend less on infrastructure, thereby reducing operating costs and streamlining the back end. 

Digital disruption is also driving the increase in open banking. Open banking predominantly uses APIs to allow third parties to access customer data to create mobile solutions. While this was an existing way to keep pace with competition from challenger banks, innovation and reducing overdraft fees, open banking is now seamlessly paving the path for contactless payments.

Beyond the enhanced performance indicators of digital disruption, it is critical to further focus on consistent omni-channel customer experience, agility, and security. And this is where organizations have to consciously choose the right strategic partners, to drive the digital transformation journey.  

Recommended Read: Digital Assurance Testing: The ‘Hulk’ of Your Financial Organization’s Digital Marvel

Although, banks face intense pressure from new entrants in financial services, they have an edge in resources they can use to rapidly launch their own digital businesses. And a potential way forward is to keep disrupting the disruptors. While the ‘cloud’ is the immediate imperative, the future of banking still needs to be constantly challenged. Leveraging the flexibility and agility of cloud technology will continue to prove its value, in sync with evolving needs and preferences. McKinsey reports that 75% of people using digital channels for the first time indicated that they would continue to use them when things return to “normal.”  

Today’s customers, more specifically the millennials, want businesses to be simple and engaging. In sync with this high-level picture, businesses unanimously agree that the must haves for digital transformation are- Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud. As customers continue to evolve their usage patterns, banks need to stress on delivering a promising customer experience throughout every touch point.  

While all these digital transformations have a few critical success metrics like business performance and reliability, the flip side involves a massive risk if not implemented with a strong testing framework. 

Testing is a vital component of success for any digital transformation project. Since, the goal revolves around a top-notch customer experience, testing must cover multiple dimensions of the product including product functionalities, integrations, compatibility, accessibility, user experience, performance, reliability, and the like. A few seconds of processing delay gone untackled can cause severe damage to reputations, thanks to the power of social media and word of mouth. 

This is precisely where test automation plays an instrumental role in driving successful testing engagement for the project. A well-thought test automation framework that is robust, capable of being effective in a continuous build & deploy environment, cover omnichannel testing and scale is a key enabler in digital testing projects. 

Time crunch is an indispensable part of the development lifecycle. Enabling a continuous integration set-up with automated tests drastically reduces the testing life cycle and speeds up the time to market. The shorter testing timelines further curb testing coverage. So, an automated regression suite that aids the validation of new features and any other aspect that otherwise relied on human screening, is almost mandatory for smooth sailing.  Yet, another important aspect of digital transformation is its omni-channel engagement. This inherently signifies the criticality of automated cross browser/device testing. Finally, digital transformation projects usually involve multiple integrations. It is hence important to ensure there are no handshake issues in the live system that may falter the customer experience, in any way. 

Having said all of this, how do banking organizations survive in the face of digital disruptions? Believe it or not, test automation strategies are the only way to go. 

Omni-Channel Testing

For any service that must be made available to a client uninhibitedly, it needs to be seamless across multiple devices. And Omni-Channel Testing is your magic sauce to ensure performance across the board. 

Continuous Testing

Continuous testing boosts integration and delivery. While it not only consistently catches the conventional bottlenecks early, it also expands testing coverage and advocates continuous monitoring throughout the development.   

Customer Experience Testing

Under the Customer Experience Testing umbrella, products and services are tested from a customer’s point of view. While customer experience is what truly recognizes a product or feature, customer experience testing can entirely challenge processes and vary from organizational expectations of a product (and its success) 

Security Testing

While digital transformation has been a game changer for the banking sector, it has brought along several different threats to the digital space. With increasing e-payment options and a ton of sensitive targeted data, security testing is the only potential rebuttal for all further new frauds and cyber-attacks. 

Big Data Testing

Consciously leveraging data into insightful and intelligent insights has now become a requisite for every organization. However, this further urges an uncompromisable testing of huge volumes of data to ensure improved ROI, performance and customer conversions.  

All in all, reimagining a digital UI is not up for the banter these days. However, banks do need to rethink the end-to-end business processes to translate the benefits of Digital Disruption. In a nutshell, the aforementioned Quality Assurance strategies will not only ensure holistic security, quality and integrity, but also help you stay ahead of the transformation game. 

 

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