The key to building a successful business is meeting consumer requirements and gaining trust. There is no place for error in the modern competitive digital landscape, or even if there are, consumers expect them to be resolved at a bullet speed. Businesses must sustain their status quo with massive expansion in the economic landscape. Whether normal circumstances or difficult scenarios, customer relies on organizations to manage their transactions and data.
Let us consider the financial and banking sector for instance: as they thrive highly on customer reputation. Many banks and financial institutions have faced the consequences of going wrong with their digital services and platform. In fact, a research paper from 2017 titled Banking System Trust, Bank Trust and Bank Loyalty highlights that the implications of losing trust in banks are significant. This paper also highlights the six determinants like competence, stability, integrity, customer orientation, transparency, and value congruence as the catalyst to restoring consumer trust and loyalty towards the services that banks offer.
Consumers’ behavior changes towards banking services when they are confident about the brand and services. Trust is the most critical factor in a consumer-bank relationship. Consumers want the BFSI sector to be dependable, transparent, and approachable. To minimize the negative impact on consumers, banks must re-establish themselves as trusted advisors and providers of assistance. But it is not just the word of mouth that is impactful; it must be backed up with services that include manual assistance and system responses. Banks and financial institutions are adopting automation testing and continuous monitoring of systems to ensure bank representatives offer their services quickly, efficiently, and effectively.
Why Test Automation?
Banking has always thrived on customer loyalty and in-person interactions. Its transition to the digital realm will benefit consumers and financial institutions.
Waiting in lines for banking hours and squandering Saturdays going in and out of banks are now a matter of the past. Digital banking allows you to access your bank accounts quickly and easily from any location using your smartphone. Banks are spending less on infrastructure and saving their operating costs with digital banking.
With the advent of digitalization, banks must focus on delivering a positive customer experience at every touchpoint. A robust testing framework is vital for delivering a superior customer experience. Test automation is critical to the success of digital testing projects.
Consistent integrations, set up with automated tests and continuous monitoring, can substantially reduce the testing life cycle. These test automation strategies are required for banking institutions to successfully navigate the digital upheavals.
Through rigorous automated testing of a banking software program, a financial organization can ensure:
- Accurate execution of activities while effectively shielding the personal data of clients
- Following all financial guidelines strictly
- Enforcement of all legal norms and guidelines
- Effective transaction management without disruptions, especially during peak hours
- Preventing fraud and cyber-attacks, making the banking application safe to use
Test automation indeed reduces time in the testing lifecycle phase, but test execution has two critical steps; one of those steps is test monitoring. Test monitoring helps evaluate all testing activities and efforts. Continuous test monitoring tracks the ongoing process and testing metrics, assessing future actions based on test data and highlighting the feedback based on the progress of the testing process to the concerned team and the shareholder. Test monitoring validates if the test process produces the desired result. Let us explore the effects of test automation and monitoring over banking and financial platforms in the light of the six determinants of ensuring consumer trust and loyalty.
- Competence – Test automation and monitoring evaluates system competency to offer high quality service and response to the customer request.
- Integrity – Test automation and monitoring ensures system performances as intended to function without any disruption.
- Customer orientation – Test automation and monitoring prepares your systems to address customers’ needs.
- Transparency – Test automation and monitoring allows companies to maintain a transparency of the transactions and trades.
- Stability – Test automation and monitoring ensures system stability and performance even during high traffic or during unforeseen events of performance failure.
- Value congruence – With test automation and test monitoring companies prepares systems to exhibit positive work outcomes. It ensures direct, positive effects on customer satisfaction, trust, affective commitment, and customer loyalty.
Improving quality with robust testing to build consumer trust
Through effective automated tests and continuous monitoring strategies, you can improve the reliability of your core banking systems and can significantly reduce costs.
1. Automated tests save time and money
Software tests are repeated several times during development cycles for quality enhancement. It is conducted every time a source code is altered or modified on every hardware configuration and operating system. Manually repeating these tests can be highly time-consuming and expensive.
Automated tests are convenient in such circumstances because they may be run repeatedly without incurring additional costs. Automated tests can take hours instead of days to complete these repetitive checks, providing customers with qualitative service whenever they want. It is a time-saving benefit that also saves money for banks.
2. Increase in test coverage
Continuous monitoring, backed by automated testing, leads to an expansion of the scope of the tests, which improves the software program’s quality. Lengthy tests, which are frequently avoided during manual testing, can be efficiently conducted via automated testing.
The tests can successfully run on multiple computers at the same time with distinct configurations. The performance and quality of banking software can be tested through automated tests that display data tables, memory contents, status of the internal program, file contents, and so on. By executing numerous complex tests throughout the test runs, automated tests can expand coverage in a manner that manual testing cannot.
3. Improvement in testing accuracy
Even the most skilled testers can make mistakes while performing manual testing. The use of automation testing, however, results in identical procedures being performed in a precise manner and the results being recorded in extensive detail. This leads to improved banking software providing customers with better service.
4. Avoid errors of manual testing
Automated testing can simulate numerous concurrent digital users interacting with web, software, and network applications. Customers benefit from this by being able to use the banking software for their needs in a hassle-free manner with minimal to no delays caused by network issues or internal errors.
5. Boon for testers and developers
Automation tests provide several capabilities that help developers and testers save time. Developers can quickly identify troublesome areas of software through automation tests and focus on resolving the issues. Automated tests can run by themselves every time the source code is modified, and they can notify the team in case of failure. With the additional time, developers may concentrate on creating more specialized software to improve the customer experience.
6. Improved morale of the development and QA team
Manually performing repetitive testing tasks can take much time and get monotonous for testers and developers, limiting their creativity. Automation testing frees up time for the development and QA teams to work on more challenging and profitable projects. This boosts the team’s morale and confidence, which favours the organization.
Conclusion
The digital era has inextricably linked banking and test automation. The automation of the BFSI sector, which involves RPA (Robotic Process Automation) and RTA (Robotic Test Automation), AI (Artificial Intelligence), Traditional Automation, and so on, has led to the development of an efficient and sustainable economy. Automation tests generate standardized audit trails, allowing financial institutions to adhere to industry standards while incurring minimum expenses.
Test Automation in banking is relevant to address today’s needs for high-quality customer experiences and agility. Excellence in test automation is essential to encourage continuous innovations and speedy rollouts of new banking services and products to customers. Banks are quickly rising to the challenge and implementing automated testing programs to save time, increase employee productivity, and enhance customer experiences while fostering trust and loyalty.
Yethi blends the testing services and test automation solutions to help the banks and financial institutions on their digital transformation journey. We focus on improving the quality and efficiency of the organization’s core software system. We are a niche QA service provider helping several global banking/financial organizations increase the agility, consistency, and accuracy of the platform.
With our efficient codeless test automation solution, Tenjin, we have taken the test automation to the next level with an accuracy rate of nearly 100%. It is a revolutionary solution, which is easy to integrate and rapidly scan through the software and detect errors. Its intuitive features empower banking and financial solutions to work 3x times faster than any other automated testing system, while the simple plug-in and play design enables easy integration. Tenjin is developed with a focus on continuously helping banks and financial institutions across the globe to build a robust and resilient testing process.