Make EMV a Part of Your Performance Testing Strategy

According to recent data made available by the Motley Fool on their Ascent website, global credit, debit, and prepaid card usage is on the rise. Credit card purchase volume amounted to $19.6 trillion in 2023, a 3.5% increase from the previous year. Purchase volume on debit cards was $17.725 trillion in 2023, an 8.6% increase from 2022.  

It is important to note that virtually all new cards being issued today utilize the EMVCo chip card processing technology. 

As noted in our recent blog “A Current Guide to EMV Testing and Certification”, data published by EMVco highlights the significant role that their chip card technology occupies in the payments domain. At the end of 2023, more than 70% of globally issued cards were EMV-enabled, totaling nearly 14 billion cards, and accounting for almost 95% of card-present transactions.  

In this blog, we’ll discuss why it is more important than ever for every payment industry participant to pay particular attention to the performance characteristics and capabilities of their processing ecosystem. We will also take a look at some of the best practices organizations can follow to ensure that their payment systems and applications achieve the highest levels of availability, reliability, and scalability. 

Why Performance Testing is More Important Than Ever 

There can be no doubt that global commerce is faster, more interconnected, and more complex than ever before, continually evolving at an ever-increasing pace. Not surprisingly, the rapid growth of digital transactions, combined with ever more sophisticated technology, security enhancements - including EMV cryptography - and regulatory pressures have left many organizations struggling to keep up. 

In the mad scramble to keep pace with all this change, one critical area that often gets overlooked is performance testing. 

Given the importance that any single transaction has to an individual or business, whether they are standing at an ATM to get cash, in the supermarket checkout line buying groceries, or conducting business online, we must do everything we can to ensure that our payment systems deliver seamless payment experience no matter how, when or where a consumer chooses to transact. 

Performance testing and analysis are critical safeguards that help ensure mission-critical networks, switches, and authorization engines can handle growing traffic volumes and sophisticated processing scenarios without fail.  

3 Best Practices for Effective Performance Testing 

Modern testing platforms, such as Paragon’s Web FASTest simulator, make configuring and running performance tests on your mission-critical payment systems and applications simple by leveraging any functional tests already set up in the tool, including EMV contact and contactless transactions. 

There is no need for specialized resources or homegrown tools that are difficult to use and expensive to maintain.  

Removing these barriers means that performance testing can be run more frequently, making it easier for organizations to adopt these industry best practices:

1. Schedule Regular Performance Testing Cycles: Performance testing and analysis should be a standard part of your testing processes. Ideally, you can conduct performance tests as a part of every build or release cycle, certainly before and after major events or software updates. 
   
   
2. Run Realistic Test Scenarios: Simulate real-world scenarios as closely as possible to identify potential issues more accurately. Mag stripe, EMV chip, and e-commerce transactions all have different processing characteristics. Your organization may also have a fraud management engine or token service provider included in some transaction paths. It is important that your testing accurately reflects the correct mix of transactions. 
   
   
3. Continuously Monitor and Optimize Your Systems: By regularly monitoring and analyzing the performance characteristics of your processing environment, it will be much easier to make the incremental adjustments needed to handle changes in capacity, processing workloads, or new technologies. 

Are you Interested in learning more about performance testing best practices, and why implementing a robust strategy is critical to avoiding outages and enhancing the customer experience? Download our free Performance Testing for Payment Industry: Best Practices Guide  today.  

The Importance of Integrated Performance Testing 

Ensuring that your payment systems and applications are available anytime that your consumers want to access them requires that you continually monitor and test the performance characteristics and capabilities of all your software and systems. 

Integrating performance testing into your standard payment testing processes helps to identify and correct issues before they result in a system failure or cause a negative customer experience. 

A modern, web-based application, like Web FASTest, allows users to incorporate functional tests, including credit and debit, mag stripe, EMV contact, and contactless, as well as e-commerce transactions, into customized performance testing sets that can be run and re-run at any time. These performance test sets can also be easily updated to reflect changes in transaction volumes or daily processing patterns. 

Web FASTest fully supports EMV processing, providing full visibility, access, and editing capabilities for all of the EMV tag data used for generating and validating the EMV cryptograms (ARQC & ARPC). Additionally, EMV cards can be created, imported, or used for transaction testing in conjunction with contact or contactless card readers. Processing traces show exactly how the cryptograms are generated and processed, giving users unprecedented control over the EMV testing process. 

Web FASTest also provides API-level connectivity with external systems so that performance testing can be easily integrated with your CI/CD pipeline or other enterprise test management environments. Regular and rigorous performance testing will help keep your applications and systems operating at peak performance, delivering the following benefits: 

• Optimized System Performance: Regular performance testing helps identify potential bottlenecks or resource limitations so they can be resolved before they cause slowdowns or outages that impact your consumers. 
  
  
• Operational Efficiency: Integrated performance testing will improve quality, increase productivity, and reduce project delivery times, establishing a solid framework for continuous improvement. 
  
  
• Superior Customer Service: A comprehensive and integrated performance testing strategy will help ensure that you deliver a superior payment experience for every consumer on every transaction, no matter how, where, or when they choose to transact. 
  
  

The team at Paragon Application Systems has more than 30 years of experience working with the largest and most sophisticated card brands, networks, and payment processors from across the globe. We understand the critical role that performance testing plays in keeping mission-critical payment systems and applications operating at peak efficiency. 

A comprehensive performance testing strategy will help improve quality, optimize transaction response times, and minimize production outages - enabling your organization to consistently deliver a superior payment experience that builds loyalty and drives both revenue growth and profitability. 

By working with Paragon, you’ll gain access to deep industry expertise, as well as a proven track record, and a corporate commitment to protect your resources, your customers, and your shareholders.  

Are you interested in learning how Paragon Application Systems can help you integrate performance testing into your payments processing environment? Request a consultation with our team of testing specialists today.