Why Testing is Critical for the Future Success of Digital Payments

During its recent Payments Forum 2024 event in San Francisco, Visa announced several new products and services that will “revolutionize the card and address the future needs of businesses, merchants, and consumers and the financial institutions that serve them.”  

For those of us with a long history working in payments, this comes as no surprise. We have seen both consumers and businesses embrace digital payments, causing the pace of change to accelerate across the entire payment industry. 

The very first line of the Visa press release illustrates this point perfectly: “The way people pay and get paid has changed more in the past five years than in the previous 50.” 

And while change is good, this velocity of change presents a real challenge for many financial services companies as they struggle to manage competing priorities, while at the same time, upgrading their complex labyrinth of legacy applications, processes, and systems. 

It seems ironic that the same infrastructure that fueled the explosive growth in electronic transactions over the past decade is now in danger of collapsing under its own weight. 

The Importance of a Seamless Digital Payment Experience

Even as the world of digital payments continues its rapid evolution, the need for industry participants to ensure the safety, reliability, and availability of their payment systems cannot be overstated. 

Increasingly sophisticated consumers demand that payment providers deliver a seamless, integrated, and frictionless payment experience anytime and anywhere they choose to transact. 

Long-term loyalty does not exist in the digital world and there are many aggressive and agile competitors waiting to steal your most valuable customers. 

That’s why protecting and optimizing the performance of critical payment system components requires investment in modern payment testing solutions that help maximize productivity, speed up delivery timeframes, and improve quality. Unfortunately, the critical role that testing plays in keeping the entire payment ecosystem safe, secure, and available is often overlooked. 

How Modern Payment Testing Empowers World-Class Digital Payment Experiences 

Specialized tools and simulators specifically designed for testing the issuer and acquirer transaction flows used by the payment industry can greatly simplify the testing process and, as a result, enable your organization to enhance the digital payment experience for consumers. 

Here are a few ways payment testing can help both your organization and its digital payments offering:

• Test Automation: These capabilities enable more tests to be completed in less time, speeding up delivery cycles and ensuring that all required tests are run consistently and accurately every time. 
  
  

• Integrations: Modern payment testing technologies are designed to integrate into broader enterprise systems, such as CI/CD pipelines. This integration, including the use of published APIs, helps foster collaboration and ensures that every code change, no matter how minor, can be tested before deployment.
  
  
• Fraud Detection and Prevention: Keeping up with fraudsters requires a concentrated and well-coordinated, multi-layered approach, including the ability to respond to new threats by testing required changes quickly, completely, and accurately. A comprehensive and coordinated approach to payment testing helps minimize risk and protects both cardholders and shareholders. 
  
  
• Peak Season Processing: Payment systems must be tested to ensure that they can handle peak processing workloads, especially during high-traffic events like Cyber Monday and Black Friday. 
  
  
• Cloud-Based Testing: No discussion on the future of the payment industry would be complete without addressing the growing adoption of cloud-based technologies. The cloud continues to revolutionize how businesses operate, and testing is no exception. Modern testing solutions can leverage the cloud to improve deployment flexibility and reduce infrastructure costs while at the same time providing anytime anywhere access to testing resources across multiple time zones and geographies.
   

Navigating The Future 

There can be no doubt that the payment industry will continue its dynamic, disruptive, and challenging evolution into the future. There is no telling where we will wind up in another five or 10 years.

In order for financial services providers to keep pace with this ever-accelerating certainty of uncertain change, they need to continually improve both organizational and operational efficiency. Investing in modern payment testing solutions will help any organization navigate these challenging times – even turning testing excellence into a competitive advantage. 

Interested in learning more about how automating, integrating, and optimizing your payment testing capabilities can help your organization deal with the rapid pace of industry change more effectively?  Reach out to Paragon today. Our team of industry experts are here to help.