Payments Testing - March 19, 2024
Whether it is developing new products and services to address changes in consumer behavior, introducing new technologies to enhance the customer experience or focusing on digital transformation to improve operational efficiency, the financial services industry must continue to innovate and optimize.
As we move through what could potentially be an economically difficult year, this drive for continuous improvement will be more important than ever before. Organizations will need to do even more with even less, in order to meet both customer expectations and their own business goals.
This blog is a summary of our new guide, 2023 Trends in Payment Testing, in which Paragon CEO Jim Perry takes a detailed look at the key trends and challenges currently impacting testing operations across the financial services industry. If you’d like to explore any of these topics in more detail please download your free copy of the guide by clicking on the below image.
1 - Managing and Motivating Your Team is Critical
Managing human resources continues to become increasingly complex. This has largely been driven by the shift to remote work and hybrid models (where employees split their time between working remotely and working in the office), which has taken place over the past few years.
Today, some 16 percent of companies globally are fully-remote and around 62 percent of employees aged 22 to 65 say they work remotely at least occasionally, according to research published by Owl Labs.
A few key things to remember when managing your teams for optimal performance:
- Engage in clear, open and direct two-way communication
- Align your team’s work with company goals
- Provide the resources, tools and technologies that your staff needs to succeed (such as testing automation)
- Empower your people to take ownership of their work
- Recognize and reward team members for their achievements
2 - The User Experience is Still as Important as Ever
Gartner says "Total experience (TX) is all about how to best use technology and interactions to enhance, empower, and embolden both customers and employees.”
Many organizations fail to consider that the user experience is also a critical factor for internal resources responsible for delivering a world-class experience to your customers on every payment transaction. It is important to support your teams with the tools and technologies that facilitate communication and collaboration so that they can be as successful as possible.
3- Testing Operations Must be Optimized
Adding on to the previous trend, it’s critical in 2023 that organizations define a plan that improves testing coverage, scale, quality and continuous improvement, while at the same time reducing costs in their testing operations.
Some ways to do this include:
- Hiring the right talent, and placing them in the right seats
- Implementing best practices and testing processes
- Improving collaboration across teams
- Investing in the right testing applications and technologies
- Automating as much testing as possible to maximize resource efficiency
4 - The Certification Process Needs to be Simplified
The ISO 8583 certification process has seen very little change over the past 25 years, becoming increasingly more complicated and difficult to manage for organizations still using legacy systems and manual processes.
There’s a significant opportunity here to improve the certification process, and prepare for the upcoming migration to the ISO 20022 standard for retail banks. Technology will play a key role in ensuring the certification process is a seamless one.
5 - It’s Time to Take Advantage of the Cloud
Many industry participants are aggressively transitioning their payment testing assets into the cloud in 2023, helping to ensure maximum testing coverage, improve scale, and reduce infrastructure costs.
Interested in learning more about the key trends and challenges the payment industry will face in 2023, and how technology can help you improve your efficiencies and deliver better results? Request a consultation with Paragon Application Systems today.
