Payments Testing - March 19, 2024
The winds of change continue to blow hard across the financial services world, with no let up in sight for businesses that accept or process payments. That’s because the use of digital payments will continue to grow rapidly. The only way to keep up with the typhoon is by embracing the concept of remote, automated testing.
According to a recent study released by Visa, 16 percent of consumers surveyed have stopped using cash and 53 percent say they will do so within a decade. The “cashless” trend is well on its way to becoming a reality.
A National Retail Federation survey found a fifth of consumers had used touchless payments for the first time by May 2020 and that more than half expected to continue even after the pandemic is over. Contactless card payments quintupled from about 700 million transactions in 2018 to 3.6 billion in 2020 and accounted for nearly 5 percent of card payments.
Meanwhile, cash accounted for only 23 percent of purchases in 2020, down from 32 percent just two years earlier in 2018.
That’s a huge number of additional transactions that the financial services world needs to handle. To ensure their products are competitive and that consumer transactions are processed perfectly every time, all payments industry participants must recognize that effective testing is more important than ever before.
Unfortunately, many organizations still do things the old fashioned way. Manual testing has typically been one of the most time consuming and expensive aspects of payment processing. All financial services companies need to adopt and embrace testing automation to stay on top of their game - which ties perfectly into another trend in today’s world, remote work.
That’s why we believe remote testing will become increasingly more common for all issuers, acquirers, merchants, processors and payment gateways over the next few years.
The benefits of remote testing
To keep up with increased consumer demand, financial service organizations need to upgrade their payment testing capabilities with modern, web-based tools and simulators that leverage concepts like virtualization to facilitate anytime anywhere access - giving businesses the ability to easily support remote developers, testers and QA resources.
The recent experience with COVID-19 has shown that remote testing has a number of significant benefits, including:
- Improved access to testing resources
- Enhanced work/life balance for staff
- Increased efficiency and productivity
- Faster project cycles
- Expanded test coverage
- Greater environmental sustainability
Some businesses in the industry are already benefiting from a remote workforce. In a recent post on LinkedIn, Dan Price, CEO and Founder of Gravity Payments, a credit card processing and financial services company based in Seattle, said:
“If you want to find workers and increase your talent pool, go remote
- if you want to save the planet, go remote
- if you want to increase productivity, go remote
- if you want to be a control freak for no good reason, force everyone back into the office
We asked our employees where they want to work. Just 7% wanted to go back to the office full time, 31% wanted an office-remote hybrid and 62% wanted to work from home all the time. So I told them: sounds great. Do whatever you want. As a CEO, what do I care? As long as you get your work done, that's all that matters.”
With more than 74 percent of professionals now expecting remote work to become standard practice in the coming years, why not start thinking about how the combination of remote and automated testing can benefit your payment testing processes today!
Are you interested in learning more about remote payment testing? With our web-based tools and simulators, as well as years of experience supporting remote testing environments, Paragon Application Systems can offer your business a great opportunity to expand and optimize its remote testing and QA capabilities.
Contact us today for more information.
