Is the pandemic connecting people digitally?
The outbreak of COVID 19 has caused the banking industry to re-think on their service strategy models to engage and retain customers. More and more customers are turning on to the digital ways of engagement to keep them and others safe. Competition has already reached its peak among the banking businesses to lead the game of digital banking. The current crisis is also witnessing many traditional banking fraternities moving towards the base fundamentals of branchless banking. According to a research study, customers who are highly satisfied with their digital experience are two-and-a-half times more likely to open new accounts with their existing bank than those who are merely satisfied with in-person banking. Another, survey conducted by a global financial services company indicate that 40% of respondents would prefer to shop, order food, etc through the online and mobile banking services.
The growing digital diversities inherit many cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, cloud, big-data, block chain to name a few. Winning and regaining customer trust would strongly lie on the customer experience levels these new technologies offer. This is where digital quality engineering would have a significant share of pie for assuring the best results.
Embedding Digital QE
“Customer Experience is the new brand” is a famous quote of Forbes. Getting superior and uniform experience across various digital modes of information access, would certainly depend on how well the application is quality engineered. While laying the foundation for Digital QE, speed and scale has to be considered to support ongoing and new-age digital banking initiatives. Testing has to happen much earlier and in-line to the development stages to avoid surprises later. That being said, digital QE has to be an integral part of digital design and development map.
With many banks keeping their lights on through new ways of digital engagement such as communications, transactions, payments and more, the need for digital quality engineering is bound to rise. All these aforesaid digital led features have to comply with early testing journey’s through shift-left approaches, for their respective functional and non-functional backgrounds.
Top 6 trends to watch in Digital QE
- Digital tech consumerization
The online ways of procuring goods and services have significantly increased, resulting in substantial growth of digital payments. Customers are turning on to their smarter devices as a mode of access. Not to forget, the smarter gadgets like Alexa and wearables, which adds up to the elite list of tech-savvy consumers. Digital QE strategies have to consider these platforms and channels to reflect omni-channel user experience (UX). Alternatively, banking systems recognizing consumer access points through multiple devices, would call for another added layer of reliability and security testing. - KPI-Driven Outcome Approach
Every digital service is strongly governed by an underlying banking business vision and a goal. Mostly these are augmented and kept in mind, while devising digital strategies in the shape of KPI’s and performance metric’s. An outcome-driven digital QE approach can be architected using the defined KPI’s. This way, testing activities can be further broken down into multiple functional and non-functional requirements, and continuous testing can be targeted to reflect the desired outcome across users and devices in consideration. - Emergence of API Testing
Testing of Application programming interfaces (API’s) would play an important card in the years to come. Openbanking has spread its wings to glory, and the future is moving towards “Banking as a platform”. As a critical layer of information exchange between banks and third-party providers (TPP), safeguarding API’s against the unknown would be crucial. Rapid validation tactics of API UI/UX with E2E automation is certainly the way forward - Cloud-led application testing will peak –
In order to keep the costs down and avail quick easy access, cloud-led banking solutions will gain momentum. The role of digital QE will expand across public, private and hybrid cloud models, which the bank adopts. Additionally, digital QE professionals would equate this peak demand through cloud led testing tools, which is also expected to rise. Cloud led testing tools offer substantial scale with ready infrastructure and test environments, to engineer quality for mobile and web applications. - More connected collaboration with insight-led modus operandi
Paul Trotter, CTO at Atom bank emphasized the possibility of achieving quality and speed at the same time with the fusion of agile, cloud, DevOps and QE. This emphasizes the importance of strong alignment between digital QE teams and development teams using Agile and DevOps led principles. Teams can connect with the development teams, to ensure faster product releases through continuous sprints in every stage of the software development life-cycle (SDLC) to detect pitfalls much earlier. Using predictive analytics, real time insights can be drawn out to continuously evolve and improve the performance. - #Engineered4Speed and #QEatVelocity will be the final call-to-action
In the current crisis, product release routines are occurring on a daily basis. This means, more speed and velocity to engineer quality would be called to action to reflect the right standards and the desired experience levels. Intelligent test automation methods can be mapped in the continuous integration and continuous development pipelines (CI/CD) for promising continuous quality.
Maveric’s digital quality engineering solutions for banking are configured with speed at a supreme scale. The tactics and measures adopted by Maveric, prosper continuous quality engineering through Agile and DevOps enablement for accelerating digital transformation journey’s for banks. 95% QE automation is a proposition anchored by Maveric, which brings cognitive methods and predictive analytics to detect pitfalls much earlier in the development cycle. QE at scale is made possible with accelerators for digital, security, performance, and compatibility/ usability. BIAN compliant API/microservices test libraries and datasets, leverage over 2 decades of banking domain experience, and a commitment to fit-for-purpose solutions.
On boarding and imparting the right digital quality engineering mastery is a plot, banks need to adopt. It has to be continuous at the same time, to sharpen the levels of quality for reflecting uniform experience.
