Current IT Trends and Their Impact on Payment Testing

The payment industry has undergone significant changes in recent years, due in large part to advances in technology. In fact, in a recent blog - Digital Transformation Requires a New Approach to Payment Testing - we discussed how modern tools are key to providing a frictionless and seamless payment experience. 

But what are some of the latest technology trends and how do they impact payment testing? In this blog we summarize today’s IT trends as reported in Spiceworks Ziff Davis’ annual 2023 State of IT report, and what these tech trends mean for payment testing.

#1 - IT Spending Will be Prioritized 

Roughly half (51 percent) of organizations plan to increase IT budgets in 2023, with only 6 percent of companies planning to cut back on tech spending. In fact, IT budgets are expected to grow by 13 percent year-on-year, with a median increase of 5 percent per company. 

• A need to upgrade outdated IT infrastructure (51 percent)
• Increased priority on IT projects (45 percent)
• Employee growth (43 percent)
• Increased security concerns (41 percent)
• Inflation (40 percent)
• Supporting a remote workforce (35 percent)

For Payments: With organizations looking to increase their IT spending, we could see many financial services organizations moving away from manual testing to automation. The use of technology to automate payment testing can help financial organizations build a robust, flexible and highly-efficient payment testing platform that leads to improved customer experiences and fast product/service delivery times. 

#2 - Recession fears won’t dampen IT budgets

Facing a potential recession, businesses no longer see technology as a cost center. Rather, IT has become an enabler that’s critical to success. 

Jim Rapoza, VP and Principal Analyst at Aberdeen Strategy & Research, a division of Spiceworks Ziff Davis, said: “The lessons learned in the first year of the pandemic, with quarantine and the move to hybrid and remote work, are still fresh in the minds of many businesses. By investing in the modernization of their IT and technology infrastructures, these businesses not only survived those inordinately uncertain times - they often thrived.”

For Payments: With economic uncertainty, we expect financial organizations to look at ways to improve the efficiency of their payment testing. Rather than continuing to employ large numbers of resources to conduct manual testing, we expect to see more strategic investments into technologies that augment existing teams to improve their productivity and expand test coverage. 

#3 - Virtualization is in the Top 10 for Percentage of Total Software Budget

The largest share of 2023 IT software budgets will go towards security software, narrowly rising above productivity software, which is historically on top. Interestingly for payments, virtualization makes it into the top 10 items on the average company’s IT software budget breakdown.

1. Security software (11 percent)
2. Productivity software (11 percent)
3. Operating systems (10 percent)
4. Industry-specific apps (8 percent)
5. Database management systems (8 percent)
6. Business support apps (8 percent)
7. Virtualization (8 percent)
8. Backup/disaster recovery (8 percent)
9. IT management (7 percent)
10. Email servers (7 percent)

For Payments: Virtualization is one of the leading technologies enabling the payment sector to move away from manual testing, helping organizations to optimize testing efficiency. This is particularly true for ATM testing. For example, here at Paragon we have our VirtualATM solution, which allows ATM fleet owners to easily deploy virtualized ATM testing assets on prem or in the cloud. Virtualization provides organizations with the capability to support a remote testing environment that enables 24x7x365 anytime, anywhere access to the testing platform.

#4 - Security IT Budgets Continue to Grow

As we discussed above, the largest share of 2023 IT software budgets will go towards security software. The study reveals planned adoption growth across many emerging security technologies, with AI use within the space also increasing.

Notable increases in security tech adoption are expected in the following areas:

• Hardware-based authentication
• Cloud workload protection
• Operational technology systems security
• Security solutions powered by AI / machine learning
• IoT security solutions

For Payments: Security is key when it comes to financial organizations. Businesses will need to do more than ever before to implement security protocols, technologies and best practices to ensure their payments and ATMs are secure from internal and external threats. This means not only improving security testing to better mitigate risk, but also securing testing processes. 

Interested in learning about how you can use modern technologies to improve the effectiveness of your payment or ATM testing processes? Get in touch with Paragon today. We have a range of innovative products that can help.