Digital Transformation Requires a New Approach to Payment Testing

The current financial services marketplace is more competitive than ever before. Sophisticated and knowledgeable consumers expect more from the brands they do business with.

Providing a frictionless and seamless payment experience is a necessity for any organization that wants to thrive and stay ahead of the competition.

Any financial services company that processes payments - card issuers and acquirers, ATM fleet deployers, payment processors or retail stores - must use modern tools and simulators that utilize virtualization and automation to build a robust, flexible and highly-efficient payment testing platform that can be easily integrated with other enterprise systems and data using APIs. 

The problem is, it’s not easy. The large majority of organizations are still using manual testing processes, and a fragmented array of legacy applications and systems. 

Further complicating matters, many payment processors lack the resources necessary to effectively develop and run all of the tests required to ensure that no bugs are released into production. 

This ultimately leads to failed transactions, negative consumer experiences - putting your brand at risk. 

This is why financial service organizations must focus on all aspects of their digital transformation - including testing. By using a modern payment testing solution, businesses can integrate and automate their testing to save time, money and significantly enhance the customer experience.

Unfortunately, many IT teams continue to struggle with rapid change and a surging volume of projects, according to a study from MuleSoft, a division of Salesforce, in collaboration with Deloitte Digital, which surveyed more than 1,050 global IT leaders on the state of connectivity and digital transformation.

In this blog, we’ve compiled a few of the top takeaways that businesses in the financial services industry can learn from.

Digital transformation is essential for a world-class customer experience 

As part of their strategy for digital transformation “Organizations need to have a central source of data and insights that can drive a positive customer experience,” says Jim Marous, CEO of the Digital Banking Report. “This experience must be personalized, fast and seamless for the consumer, showing that the financial institution wants to make their life easy.” That puts integration and automation at the core of a transformational strategy.

The harsh reality is that most companies lack the necessary infrastructure to deliver an integrated and consistently excellent customer experience. Here are a few key takeaways from the study when it comes to the importance of digitization:

• While applications lie at the center of digital transformation and efforts to enhance the customer experience, the average organization is using 976 individual applications (compared to 843 a year ago). Only 28 percent of these applications are integrated on average, leading to poor user experiences.
   
• Overcoming security and governance challenges is a hurdle. Security and governance (54 percent) was cited as the biggest challenge to integrating user experiences, ahead of outdated IT infrastructure (46 percent) and an inability to keep up with ever-changing processes, tools and systems (42 percent).
  
  
• Integrating user experience via APIs delivers business benefits. Of the organizations that have integrated user experiences, more than half said it had enhanced visibility into operations (54 percent) and increased customer engagement (54 percent). Other benefits realized included innovation (50 percent), improved ROI (48 percent) and increased automation adoption (45 percent).

Data silos are holding back the transformation 

Data silos are a significant barrier when it comes to building enhanced customer experiences. This is especially true in the area of payments, where specific payment channels, such as ATMs, have historically been isolated as a separate business unit. In fact, the number of organizations citing silos stood at 90 percent. 

• IT budgets are up, but so is demand. 85 percent of organizations said IT budgets have increased year-on-year (compared to 77 percent last year). At the same time, the number of projects IT is asked to deliver increased by 40 percent on average, a big jump from 30 percent a year ago. Despite the extra budget, IT is finding it difficult to meet the demands of the business. On average, more than half (52 percent) of projects weren’t delivered on time over the past 12 months.

This is a strong indicator that the QA teams of payment processing organizations simply don’t have the resources available to them to effectively do their job and deliver world-class customer experiences. So, what’s the solution?

What can you learn from these findings about your payment testing processes?

To deliver the best customer experience possible, financial services businesses must first look internally to see how digital transformation of their own testing processes can lead to improved productivity, accuracy and efficiency. 

With smaller budgets and fewer resources, testing virtualization and automation, and integration via APIs are absolute requirements for any organization that wants to improve quality, expand test coverage, deliver new products and services to the market more rapidly..

The result? Delivery of a superior customer experience, faster time to market for innovative new products and improved profitability. 

Want to learn how you can achieve these results for your organization ? Contact Paragon Application Systems today. We deliver world-class payment testing tools and simulators that help financial services companies to automate repetitive tasks, increase testing efficiency, measure system performance and gain complete visibility and control over their payments testing environment. 

We would love to help your business do just that!