Effective payment testing is a crucial aspect of ensuring payment transactions are processed efficiently, reliably and securely for all merchants, issuers, acquirers and processors. Thorough and accurate testing means that these organizations are able to ensure a seamless, and high-quality customer experience on every transaction.
To complicate matters, each card brand and payment network uses its own interpretation of various messaging standards to facilitate the processing of its financial transactions, requiring a never ending process of analysis, testing and certification.
Surprisingly, many transaction processors (including said card brands and networks) still rely on manual processes and fragmented legacy systems to support their esting infrastructure. This is simply the least efficient and most expensive way to approach this critically important aspect of their business.
Like many processes in life, the 80/20 rule applies to payment testing. In broad terms, 20 percent of the transactions generate 80 percent of the volume (such as purchase, purchase with cashback, credits and refunds), and that equates to a huge amount of work for your testing and QA teams.
These common transactions still need to be tested - you can’t take the risk of failures here - but testing them manually is no longer sustainable or cost-effective. That’s why leveraging testing automation is so important.
Thankfully, these common testing scenarios are the easiest to automate and can save the greatest amount of time for your organization.
How you will benefit from automating common payment testing scenarios
Many organizations in the payment industry still don’t have the tools, technologies and processes in place to effectively set up developers, testers and QA resources for success. Testing is still often done manually, taking too long, costing too much, compromising quality and hindering the overall efficiency and profitability of the business.
In order to be competitive and succeed in the long-term, automated testing has become an absolute requirement.
Of course, introducing automation requires investments in the right tools and technology. The fastest way to achieve rapid ROI is by quickly automating the most common transaction types, which make up the majority of your testing work.
Automation makes it easy to run these common scenarios over and over again, anytime from anywhere, on whatever schedule makes sense for your organization. Automation expands test coverage, improves quality, shortens project delivery cycles and reduces time-to-market for new revenue generating products and services.
Once you have the most common test scenarios covered, you can use the savings generated to strategically expand your automation capabilities to include additional transactions, integration with other enterprise systems, including CI/CD pipelines, etc.
Getting started on your automation journey
Paragon Application Systems has designed the Web FASTest platform to enable 24x7 global access to an enterprise level testing environment - making your operational processes significantly more flexible and efficient.
The more you use a tool like Web FASTest, the more valuable it becomes. Organizations that start by automating their most common transactions can achieve a rapid ROI that helps fund additional improvements that will generate significant long-term benefits.
In addition to its robust automation capabilities, Web FASTest provides a single testing platform, a common set of processes, and a consistent reporting mechanism for a wide variety of ISO, non-ISO and ATM message formats (including ISO 20022), as well as support for scheduling regression tests, 24x7x365 support for remote workers, and much more.
To learn more, request a consultation with Paragon today.