A look at the banking industry as it is now
Since 2011, change has been the name of the game in banking, primarily because of the rise of the digital economy as a whole.
An influential study discusses the Disruptability Index, namely the measure of disruption across industries on a scale of 0 to 1. The research reported that 20% of all players in the banking and payments industries will be younger than 15 years old in 2020. Regarding current disruption, banking went from 0.43 in 2011 to 0.52 in 2019, moving it from the Vulnerable category to the Volatile category.
Rising customer expectations, nimble new industry players, powerful new technologies, and changing regulations are all driving these changes. This reality puts incumbent banks under much pressure to bring real innovation to their established businesses. Enter the era of “Super Apps” and especially the banking apps.
What does the rise of Super Apps mean for banking?
One app for everything digital: chatting with friends, playing games, sharing photos, buying tickets, planning trips, watching movies, and paying for a taxi. It would be great to have that. In fact, going one step further, can the same app track all your finances? The user cannot only pay for the taxi but also apply for a loan, manage their investments, or get insurance.
Consider Kakao in South Korea, WeChat, AliPay in China, Gojek and Lime in Indonesia and India. These so-called “super apps” bring many digital services to smartphones simultaneously. By offering a wide range of their services and third-party services that work well together on a single platform, they meet all their users’ daily needs in one place.
What a Banking Application Looks Like
A quick roundup of banking applications will bring standard features.
- Multiple levels of functionality that support thousands of user sessions at the same time.
- Integration on a large scale that supports complex ways of doing business: Usually, a banking application integrates with many other applications, like the Bill Pay utility and Trading Accounts.
- Processing in real-time and in batches with a high number of deals per second
- Robust safety and security measures with a vital reporting section to track daily transactions.
Testing Banking Applications for Quality Assurance
A banking app usually has a complicated structure because the team that makes it has to deal with many different features and ensure the users are safe while still making the app fun and easy to use. If a company releases a product full of code errors that don’t work well, it will probably hurt its reputation. Because of this, it is essential to track, evaluate, and improve the tool’s performance based on real-world situations.
Why you need to test your mobile banking application
Because they deal with sensitive assets, banking applications are more likely to be hacked than other projects. Hackers often go after financial software, so a company that works in the banking industry has to be super vigilant for security risks. Testing a mobile banking app is a way for the team that made it to predict and take care of security and performance problems before they happen. It has other benefits as well, such as:
Supporting complex, integrated systems better. The technology and design of banking software are often very complicated. Instead of putting out a tool that doesn’t work and having to fix bugs haphazardly, a continuous testing strategy lets the development team prepare the product for release as it’s being made.
Make sure the system follows the rules, which change often. A manager in banking needs to remember that testing products are an ongoing process. One problem is that tech debt tends to grow with added features. Additionally, a tool’s performance loses stability as new security laws and rules are enforced. In today’s age, agile developers must find new ways to keep user data safe.
Improving the user experience and retaining customers. People generally have a low tolerance for bad apps, and this is even more true for banking products. Dealing with bugs and performance problems hurt your client’s work and their ability to manage their finances. By testing the product thoroughly before putting it on the market, you can gain a customer’s trust and strengthen your relationship with them.
Ensure that sensitive data is kept safe. When software isn’t working right, data can be lost or leaked. A data leak is bad for most businesses, but it usually doesn’t kill them. There is no room for error when it comes to banking. If you don’t protect your users’ data, you could put your clients’ money at risk.
Checking how well the app works in all possible situations. When developers test an internet banking app, they can understand how it will look for people with different Internet speeds or on other web browser clients and operating systems (iOS/Android). Also important is to determine the traffic limit after which the product slows down or shows performance errors. So, a business manager can predict when there will be much traffic and put in more effort before the traffic rush.
Conclusion
Quality Assurance (QA) and testing are becoming more critical to the digital transformation of most industries. The banking industry is following the digital roadmaps of other sectors to get the most money out of using technology. In the end, quality-assured digital banking services help meet the needs of tech-savvy customers.
