Self-Service Testing Tools Save Time and Money

Self-Service Testing Tools Save Time & Money

In the fast-paced world of retail commerce, testing and certification are critical activities for organizations involved in processing digital payments. In order to protect the integrity and safety of the payment ecosystem, all participants must ensure that they can accurately and securely exchange transaction data in compliance with industry standards. Unfortunately, many operations still rely too heavily on manual testing processes, resulting in decreased productivity, extended delivery timeframes, and difficulty meeting compliance deadlines.

The good news is that by utilizing modern web-based testing solutions that support automation and provide extended self-service capabilities, payment businesses can significantly increase their testing bandwidth and reduce the time and effort required for certification and compliance. 

The Value of Payment Testing & Certification

Payment testing and certification play a critical role in ensuring the smooth flow of digital transactions across different networks, systems, and applications. It’s not just red tape: the certification process helps ensure that all the different players in the payment ecosystem can exchange mission-critical messages and data quickly, accurately, and securely. 

Payment Certification and compliance therefor play an important role in facilitating the seamless flow of global commerce in several key areas: 

• Financial Messages are Correctly Formatted and Exchanged: Certification ensures that all parties can format, send, and receive payment messages correctly according to the defined specifications and protocols.
• Transaction Data is Accurate and Secure: Security is more important than ever with multiple security standards across devices, networks, and applications now required to protect consumers, businesses, and shareholders.
• Seamless Flow Across Networks: Additionally, certification processes enable payments to flow freely between issuers, acquirers, processors, and merchants in multiple countries, currencies, time zones, etc.

The Certification Challenge

Despite its importance, traditional certification and compliance processes are often inefficient for several reasons:

• They rely on legacy processes and have too many external dependencies.
• High demand for access to limited personnel, lab time, and other testing assets causes bottlenecks and delays.
• Manual testing and validation are cumbersome, time-consuming, and error-prone.
• They are expensive, i.e., projects that take too long and use too many resources invariably wind up costing more than they should.

Businesses focused on digital transformation should consider how modern testing tools leverage automation and self-service capabilities to minimize the overhead associated with legacy certification processes. Increased operational efficiency, improved testing accuracy, faster project deliveries, and reduced costs.

Better Testing Tools Deliver Better Results...

When evaluating the capabilities of a new payment testing solution, it’s important to ensure that your development, testing, and QA resources have the information and facilities they need to be as accurate, productive, and successful as possible, including:

• Shared access to clean, current, and accurate test data.
• The ability to run tests anytime, anywhere, without waiting on external resources.
• Options to simulate both acquirer and issuer endpoints in one environment.
• Flexible automation opportunities.
• Immediate results and feedback, including detailed error messages.
• Bit-level editing and validation capabilities.
• Self-service tools and resources to solve problems quickly and easily.
• Intuitive project tracking dashboards and reports.
• Integrated functional, regression, and performance testing capabilities.

...And Tangible Benefits 

1. Accelerated Certification Timelines

Robust self-service capabilities help to eliminate bottlenecks and scheduling delays, allowing teams to run tests on demand and complete testing and certification cycles in days or weeks instead of months. This speed enables faster product launches and quicker time-to-revenue.

2. Streamlined Project Oversight

Centralized dashboards, customizable user roles, and detailed audit trails give teams greater visibility and control throughout the testing and certification process. Project managers can easily track progress, assign responsibilities, and ensure organizational alignment.

3. Enhanced Customer Experience

By catching and resolving issues early in the payment certification process, companies can detect and correct errors before they show up in production. This leads to fewer interruptions, improved customer service levels, and increased profitability.

4. Increased Accuracy

The consistency of automated testing helps ensure every message and transaction is correctly verified against the required specification. Test results and reports are available immediately to highlight any defects or errors that need to be corrected.

5. Improved Operational Control

Stay compliant and agile with real-time updates to testing specifications, built-in version control, and flexible test environments - with no desktop software to manage or maintain. Teams can quickly respond to new card scheme mandates and evolving industry requirements without disrupting existing workflows.

6. Lower Operational Costs

By introducing automation to reduce manual testing efforts and using self-help capabilities to minimize reliance on external resources, organizations not only improve operational efficiency, but can also realize significant cost savings.

Web FASTest: The Self-Service Advantage

Paragon's Web FASTest solution enables organizations to manage more of the payment testing and certification process in-house. With built-in message specifications, simulation tools, and testing templates for major card brands, it provides a comprehensive testing platform to support the technical needs of developers, testers, and QA resources, while keeping business stakeholders happy. And because Web FASTest can be deployed on-prem or in the cloud, organizations can choose the option that works best for them.

Ready to Streamline Your Testing Operations?

Request a Consultation with the Paragon Team to learn how Web FASTest can help improve the speed, quality, and security of your testing and certification operations.