The Necessity of Quality Assurance for Digital Payments

The veil has been lifted, the masks are off. A couple of decades ago, the customer took what was offered. Organizations did what they felt was in their power. There was a mystery regarding the on-goings of trade, and trade-secrets were greatly guarded. As time passed, however, communication took a new meaning altogether. There are still trade-secrets and secret ingredients, and other forms of intellectual property. The interaction between customers and organizations, however, has taken on a whole new meaning. Customer experience is the ultimate factor by which organizations are driven today, mostly because of the state of perfect competition. Word travels fast in the world of social media, and the reputation of an organization could be tarnished for several cultural and political reasons, which may otherwise seem out of the purview of the business. Add to this mixture, the trade of finance, and one can easily see how complicated processes can get.

Regulatory compliance, legal business conduct, efficient and secure online banking services, and ease of customer access to those services are a few broad categories that determine the success of a banking institute. Fintech corporations have stepped in and have taken an innovative approach to banking by integrating technology with banking. What is started, however, must continue in earnest and only evolve in time to come. The intermediary processes involved require to be firmly intact, right from the design and development of a product or software, all the way to its operation and the inevitable upgrade. There is a certain overwhelming desire of the general public for banks to provide digital payments services. In a cashless economy, it becomes ever more necessary to explore the area of digital payments. It is said that social media platforms exist to serve the basic purpose of “validation” for today’s youth. Well, what is more crucial than validation when it comes to running an economy real-time?

Providing information related to banking and financial services has greatly uplifted modern society in terms of the investment decisions one could make, or the consequences of a bad credit history. Similarly, real-time digital payments have become the new normal, because they standardize and quantify processes, saving a lot of legal paperwork. With the onset of biometric authentication, there has been even more of a break through with the kind of financial services being offered by third-party vendors and banking institutes. There are several factors that go into determining the success of a digital payment initiative. Conducive infrastructure goes a long way in determining the ease with which such payments services can be opted. For the infrastructure to be conducive, and in order to guarantee system secureness, there is an urgency and demand for robust software testing.

Quality Engineering aims to determine and raise the standard of quality across departments, collaboratively. Quality Engineering ensures that quality of the product is assured right from the early stages of the application lifecycle. Due to the monumental increase of interaction with customers, however, it is essential that there is digital assurance across the entire digital platform. Digital assurance is an incumbent process in guaranteeing the seamlessness and efficient platform integration with the provision of digital services. The impact of digital technology on the domain of Banking Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) is clearly visible owing to the extensive usage of tablets, smartphones, and social media. Through these channels, customers can easily access, and interact with financial institutions from anywhere at any given time.

This trend has paved the way for newer ways of financial transactions, such as Ping Pay, Google Pay, and Apple Pay, and has also led to emergence of newer players like PayTM. There are mainly three prominent initiatives that can garner a great improvement in productivity. Continuous Testing, Omni-channel testing, and Cybersecurity QA.

Continuous testing in the BFSI sector speeds up the processes of continuous integration and continuous delivery. It gives project teams a constant feedback and empowers them to test in earlier stages of the application lifecycle, with greater coverage. This removes the standard traditional testing bottlenecks such as unavailability of fully-equipped test environments. There is a huge amount of data involved in the financial and insurance sectors. Continuous monitoring between development and IT operations helps success of agile teams using DevOps practices.

Omni-Channel testing is for products or services where the offering has to be made available to anyone, at anytime, anyplace within the BFSI sector. It should be available to customers using multiple devices with a single process spanning across multiple devices. Omni-Channel testing helps ensuring performance across all channels – whether offline or online.

As technology trends are playing a huge role in the enhancing digital transformation in BFSI sector, they are also introducing a threat environment to the organizations. Due to the emergence of new payment methods using digital technologies, BFSI organizations have been exposed further to new gateways of cyberattacks and fraud. Security testing, thus, is crucial and has business critical importance as banks hold huge volumes of sensitive data of customers for which they are targeted daily.

In Conclusion

Cigniti Technologies is a leading global software testing services organization. We have partnered with tools specific vendors and we have recently unveiled our software testing platform, BlueSwan that offers a range of software testing services. We believe that the next step for businesses in the digital era must be done with equal amounts of caution and confidence. To avail our services or know more about our experts, visit our website.

Cigniti is conducting a webinar on Leveraging Quality Engineering to Achieve Secure Digital Payments. Be part of this enriching webinar with Cigniti’s thought leaders, Sai Chintala, President – Enterprise Solutions and Raghuram Krovvidy, VP – Global Delivery, on Thursday, February 2nd, 3.30 PM – 4.30 PM IST & 10 AM – 11 AM GMT, where they will cover the following topics:

• Fintech & Digital Payments Technology Trends & Impact on your Industry
• Quality Engineering practices to help provide a seamless, secure, and superior customer experience
• Best Practices in Security, Functional, Performance, Usability, API Testing, etc.

Click here to watch for webinar.