Why test automation is a moment of truth for small and medium-sized banks 

Small and medium-sized banks feel the pressure of digital banking when they miscalculate where to begin their transformation journeys and where to go next.  At times, they are only looking to modernize their core capabilities to enable smooth upgrades, meet regulatory compliance, launch new products, or enter new segments. Other times, they are eager to digitalize their front-end applications to increase customer engagement, cross-sell/up-sell, etc.

One of the common missteps of small/medium-sized banks is that they underestimate the influence of accelerated testing in meeting the explosive demands of Agile and DevOps. As a result, especially during a time when continuous application development is the new normal, they have little choice but to take an uncompromising stance on adopting top-notch testing practices.

Test automation – the key to accelerated banking excellence

As per a recent study, “44% of IT organizations worldwide have automated 50% of their testing between 2019-2020.” It’s why there’s no doubt that irrespective of the size of your bank, test automation can be a game-changing enabler for staying afloat in a highly competitive industry. Furthermore, AI-powered test automation allows smaller banks to be flexible and scalable, empowering them with key benefits, such as:

  • Early discovery of bugs/defects during the development stage
  • Consistent testing cycles – covering all browsers/platforms/devices
  • Quicker time-to-market for new products
  • Workflow reusability to increase the scope of modernization
  • Rapid feedback cycle to increase the quality of releases

Despite these advantages, small and medium-sized banks continue to be hesitant about investing in test automation due to a simple reason – budgets. It’s an irrefutable fact too. Test automation does not come cheap. But it’s extremely affordable for an even simpler reason – expenses. Typically, all-sized banks spend a lot of time and effort in testing and deploying any application. Some may even argue that they spend less time actually developing it! Plus, a majority of the disastrous incidents are caused by the manual workforce during manual releases.

Now, imagine if a bug in an otherwise stable product feature went undetected. Or what if a new banking channel has been hacked or exposed to some other cyber threat? By embracing test automation, banks can navigate past these major roadblocks.

So, while test automation budgets can’t be compromised, there’s a clear path to significant ROI – led by cost reduction – when executed the right way. For instance, due to inadequate test coverage, you may leak a defect into production on a stable feature that may potentially cause losses to the business.

Five other reasons why budgeting is not an excuse to ignore test automation

  • Comprehensively test all new features/codes in a short time-frame
  • Test the stable features with limited resource availability
  • Increase workforce productivity by eliminating repetitive stable feature tests
  • Use product quality feedback to fix defects and ensure timely product releases
  • Align test coverage requirements with business goals to improve digitalization ROI

Adopting an incremental approach to test automation

Smaller banks should follow an incremental model to adopting test automation – an agile methodology that involves testing applications in individual modules. It equips them to accelerate the testing frequency while harnessing on-demand scalability to keep up with the pace of the business. Incremental test automation is also helpful in continuously and cost-effectively identifying defects from the early development stage onward.

It’s also important for these banks to start small. They can use Open Source tools to automate the testing of a few components of business-critical workflows. However, it is necessary to work with a reliable technology partner in order to achieve faster and higher ROI while effectively extending test automation across other critical workflows.

Aspire’s AI-powered test automation framework is based on our rigorous, synchronous, and continuous testing methodology. These exclusive frameworks are scalable, reusable, and easy to use, which means that you can take advantage of cutting-edge testing tools without worrying about justifying ROI and dealing with complicated and time-consuming integration/implementation challenges.

 

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