Testing Automation - December 27, 2023
“Payments is one of the most disrupted domains within the financial services industry. Technological innovations and shifts in customer behavior and expectation have fueled this disruption…”
So says Anirban Bose, Financial Services Strategic Business Unit CEO and Group Executive Board Member at Capgemini, leading off his opening statement in the report “Payment Top Trends 2023”.
Dealing with disruption requires a strategic plan that emphasizes the importance of improving testing coverage, scale, quality, and continuous improvement - all while reducing costs in your testing operations. Organizations must adopt an “Automation First” mindset to address repetitive or complex testing tasks, enabling your teams to do more with less, especially where it is difficult to acquire and retain the staff with the necessary expertise.
In Capgemini’s, Technovision 2023 Report “Right the Technology, Write the Future”, Mr. Bose further states:
“Automation is helping realize new use cases for FIs in the form of expedited customer onboarding, self-service options, AI-enabled virtual assistants, and more. These developments not only directly smoothen the customer experience but also help cut down the back-end processing time, freeing up resources and ultimately delivering a better experience for customers.”
With these thoughts in mind, this blog takes a look at 10 key benefits your organization can realize by aggressively incorporating automation into its payment testing processes.
1 - Increased Efficiency
Automation complements and enhances your manual testing efforts, enabling teams to run more tests, faster. Automation also provides the opportunity to schedule and run large sets of tests, such as regression testing, at any time.
2 - Expanded Test Coverage
Continual automation of your functional tests will result in an ever expanding library of messages and transactions that can be used and reused as conditions require. The more tests that you can automate, the more coverage you gain, and the better your ROI.
3 - Improved Accuracy
Automation helps reduce the risk of human error, ensuring that tests are performed consistently and accurately every time - improving the reliability and quality of your payment offerings, minimizing rework, and increasing customer satisfaction.
4 - Flexibility and Scalability
Aggressive use of testing automation provides both the flexibility and scalability organizations need to quickly respond and adapt to changing corporate priorities, new business opportunities and evolving consumer behavior.
5 - Faster Time-to-Market for New Products and Services
Since automated testing increases efficiency, expands test coverage and improves accuracy your teams will be able to complete more projects - including the development of innovative new products and services - on time and on budget.
6 - Reduced Costs
While there is an upfront cost to deploy tools and simulators that support test automation, they will help financial services companies save both time and money - with ROI increasing over time as more and more test cases are automated. Testing automation further helps the bottom line by improving overall product quality, increasing customer loyalty and protecting shareholder value.
7 - More With Less
Investing in testing tools and technologies that facilitate automation will significantly reduce the amount of repetitive and redundant testing for your teams - enabling them to refocus their efforts on higher value tasks, such as developing new revenue generating products and fighting fraud.
8 - Enhanced Security
It is important that an organization’s entire payment ecosystem, including the hardware, the software, and internal processes - all work together to make life as difficult as possible for any bad actors. And since fraud patterns continually evolve, so too must your testing capabilities. By taking advantage of the speed, flexibility and accuracy that automation offers, your resources will be able to spend more time on higher-value tasks, like developing new test scenarios to help fight fraud.
9 - Superior Customer Experience
One of the primary goals of testing is to ensure that your payment products, services and systems are always available, secure and easy to use, no matter when or where a consumer chooses to transact. Using automation to optimize testing operations demonstrates your organization’s commitment to providing a superior customer experience.
10 - Competitive Advantage
By leveraging the multiple benefits that testing automation offers, financial services companies can gain a competitive advantage by delivering products and services to the market more quickly, with higher quality, and at lower costs.
Gartner predicts that by 2025, 70 percent of organizations will implement structured automation to deliver flexibility and efficiency, an increase from 20 percent of organizations in 2021. This doesn’t mean automation is only a tool to replace people, automation is a tool to support and augment the work they do, making them faster, more effective, and, most importantly, more successful.
A comprehensive testing strategy that focuses on automation will help your organization to take advantage of the benefits that test automation can provide and enable you to consistently deliver a superior payment experience to your customers on every transaction.
The key components of an effective payment test automation strategy include analyzing the requirements of your payment system, defining specific test objectives, selecting the right test automation tool, creating a detailed test plan, executing tests, and monitoring progress.
Not sure where to start? Paragon is here to help your organization build a successful payment test automation strategy. We have designed a range of solutions to help financial service companies automate their testing processes.
Interested in learning more? Get a free consultation with our team today.
