Home > blog > Mobile banking application testing – The Need and Best Practices

Mobile banking demand is rising steeply worldwide. With social distancing and lockdowns, there is an increase in demand for self-service and personalized products and services. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of digital banking solutions – pushing it from just a trend to an essential banking functionality. According to a report from Adjust, a mobile measurement organization, there was a 26 percent increase in mobile banking and payment application in 2020 compared to 2019.

Supporting the dynamic needs of digital banking is continuous development, deployment, and integration. But without testing the application, can a bank ensure positive customer experiences?

Why banks need continuous mobile banking application testing?

Banking applications are known for their complex network, high volume of transactions, multi-tiered functionality, and legacy dependency. In the current age of Open Banking and digital eco-system, mobile banking applications work with the core banking systems and at times connect to third-party applications. The complex network of systems, applications, and players requires constant monitoring, assessment, and real-world optimization of the application.

  • Bug-free banking applications: For the development team, mobile banking application testing is a way to proactively monitor, predict, and manage performance and security issues. Releasing a product with several bugs severely impacts the organization’s reputation. To avoid performance issues, banks need to adopt a continuous testing strategy.
  • Regulatory and safety compliance: As banks deal with sensitive data, safeguarding user information is of utmost priority. Defective software products are a security risk and vulnerable to attacks by malicious players. With new features added frequently, developers and testers should align their security protocols to regional and international security laws and regulations
  • Ensuring quality at speed: The competitive environment demands rapid delivery of high-quality applications at speed. In-house quality assurance (QA) teams are overwhelmed with the workload, making it difficult for banks to test thoroughly. A QA partner can help you navigate the space by performing in-depth due diligence. Several automated solutions also aid QA teams to test rapidly without compromising on quality. For instance, Maveric’s IQe mobile solution ensures high-quality application releases aligned with the scale and speed your organization demands. The AI-based real-time dashboard and predictive analysis help testers better meet both customer and end-user expectations.
  • Improving user experience: Mobile banking usage is rapidly growing with the younger tech-savvy generation. Gen Z has a low tolerance to buggy applications and demands smooth services across touchpoints. Also, their app reviews play a critical role in the overall app branding and its popularity. Testing your mobile banking software is crucial to gain customer trust and loyalty.

Featured Case Study

apac

Top 5 Best practices for mobile banking testing

The pandemic has undoubtedly increased consumer dependency on technology. The need for self-service solutions is pushing for efficient mobile banking solutions. Today’s applications require omnichannel-oriented testing across end-user touchpoints, devices, networks, and operating systems. While automated testing is in place, here are a few best practices to follow:

  • Plan your test strategy and review: Mobile banking application testing is an essential process in the application development strategy. But most organizations take the traditional waterfall testing approach, pushing testing to the end of the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Delaying the testing leads to delayed detection of defects and bugs – affecting the time to market. Plan your test strategy and adopt an agile process that allows for greater collaboration, transparency, and efficiency.
  • Be proactive: Testing is not a one-time activity. Application testing must be a regular and continuous process. Put your application through the rigor of intelligent test automation. Adopting shift-left testing for engineering mobile application quality would speed up the CI/CD pipeline.
  • Test across devices: With smartphone manufacturers releasing new phones and software updates regularly, your application should function across all devices. Apart from simulated testing, test your application on real devices, OS, networks, browsers, screen size etc, before release.
  • Invest in technology: New and emerging technologies combined with the power of IoT are driving consumer trends. While the present demands smooth mobile transactions, the future calls for the convergence of devices such as wearables. Wearable banking is the future of mobile banking and digital payment strategies. An example of such a strategy would be CaixaBank’s contactless payment system. The Spanish bank’s wireless wristband enables transactions with a tap of the wrist – essentially eliminating the need for debit or credit cards.
  • Elevating human experience continuously with continuous improvements – The end game for mobile banking applications is customer satisfaction. Banks which have the best reviews for their mobile application would see a better and profitable future. So, it is highly imperative that banks take a closer look of their mobile banking application on a continuous basis to remain highly competitive and be on top of the charts. This principle of continuous improvement has to be embedded while laying the foundation for your mobile banking strategy. Maveric’s DEEP (Digital Experience Enhancement Platform) solution closely evaluates customer experience quality and provides continuous improvement strategies. The deep-dive study conducted by DEEP, facilitates metrics, whitespaces and review score-card while benchmarking your mobile banking application against your toughest competitor or top ranked mobile banking applications. Additionally, using sentiment analytics it gathers public app reviews, internal CRM system and more, to present holistic insights for improving mobile app build. DEEP analyses mobile applications across 50+ services and 7 dimensions. This way, DEEP elevates human experience continuously to nurture and grow the future of mobile banking.

Deep

A Contextual Solution for mobile banking testing

Maveric’s IQe mobile solution is an intelligent automation masterpiece for accelerating mobile application build, deployment and validation. Through cognitive powers and no-code/low-code automation, IQe Mobile facilitates rigorous levels of validation scrutiny across vast testing scenarios. The dedicated cloud mobile lab gives you access to multitudes of mobile devices, OS, networks, hardware sizing etc for thorough levels of mobile application testing. Additionally, IQe Mobile offers flawless cross-browser testing for validating compatibility, performance, user-experience, reliability, responsiveness and more. The embedded AI-powered analytics offer QA teams to predict and detect defects much earlier to avoid cost leakages. The below figure displays the premier features of IQe Mobile,

Q mobile

Wrapping Up

In the world of “Apps for everything”, there is no doubt that mobile banking applications will be holding the trump card for the future of digital banking. More than customer experience, it would be the human experience that would matter while evangelising and building cutting-edge mobile apps. Introspection of mobile application quality with speed and scale using the right set of testing practices and automation mastery will define the way forward. Traditional QA methods have to be relooked with versatile quality engineering practices, to reflect mobile banking quality in its top-notch shape for frictionless experience.

Article by

Maveric Systems