In the banking industry, consumers increasingly demand digital tools to execute transactions and access services that banks and other financial institutions offer. Ease of use, convenience, personalization, and 24*7 services are among the significant factors driving this consumer demand. In line with this surging demand, organizations compete to deliver the best mobile banking applications and websites that facilitate everything from checking account balances and transferring money to availing loans and trading stocks.
Banking applications have a complex structure, as they accommodate multi-layered workflows and offer a wide range of features. In addition, as these apps deal with sensitive data, including customers’ financial and personal information, the level of data protection should also be flawless. Hence, software testing for banking applications needs to be designed with utmost precision, as the lack of test coverage can lead to data breaches, loss of funds, banking fraud, and other felonies.
Banking application testing is a software testing procedure to examine a banking application's functionality, performance, and security. Mobile banking app testing allows a software development team to predict and proactively manage the banking app’s protection and performance issues. The primary focus of banking application testing is to guarantee that the banking software's actions and features are secure and run smoothly.
Also check out: Tips for Testing Mobile Banking Apps
In the post-COVID era, implementing technology in the banking, financial service, and insurance (BFSI) sector is no longer optional. Not only has the pandemic expedited the rate of digital transformation within organizations, but it has also sped up the digital embracement rate among consumers globally. As users across the world have become significantly more technology-dependent, financial services companies must rapidly adapt to new trends.
Mobile and online banking services have opened new doors for financial service providers to build a lasting bond with customers, reduce operating costs, and comply with regulations. However, if not monitored effectively, a banking domain application can expose a financial service provider to a multitude of risks, such as security breaches, faulty transactions, and bad customer relationships due to increased bounce rates, all of which may negatively impact the profit, functioning, and reputation of the organization.
To follow industry standards, a financial service provider’s software development team needs to be aware of the critical characteristics of successful banking software.
Some of the crucial characteristics of a banking application are listed below. It must:
1. Gather and Identify Requirements: A tester documents the requirements and sorts those under the specified use case or functional specification. In the BFSI sector, testers should have sufficient domain knowledge, as banking has multiple sub-domains, and one full-fledged banking application may integrate all these domains. They should be able to think from both the stakeholder’s and the end user’s points of view. For every aspect of an application, such as money transfers, bill payments, mortgages, loans, and deposits, there exists a module, and the tester must categorize the requirement into a specific module.
2. Build a Business Scenario and Review Requirements: Once the application requirements list is set up, it must be reviewed further. QA engineers build business scenarios covering all business requirements based on the requirement documents (including function specifications or use cases). These are high-level scenarios and may not include any detailed steps. This review involves all stakeholders - business and technical - including QA engineers, development leads, and peer business analysts. They cross-check to ensure that the existing and new business workflows are not violated. Once all requirements are verified and validated, follow-up actions and requirement document revisions are done based on the same.
Also check: Why End-to-End is Testing Crucial for Banking Apps
3. Build a Test Case Suite: Post review, automation engineers select test cases to determine which of these test cases can be automated and create custom scripts. In software testing in financial services, a QA specialist can also opt for manual testing, wherein they assemble a team of testers and allocate responsibilities to each one.
This stage involves:
Test Case Preparation: Test cases are derived from business scenarios. One business scenario leads to several positive and negative test cases. Generally, the tools used during this stage are test management tools such as ALM/Quality Center, qTest, TestRail, and TestDirector.
Test Case Review: Reviews by peer QA engineers.
Test Case Execution: Test case execution may be manual or automatic, involving tools like Quality Center (QC) and Unified Functional Testing (UFT).
4. Functional Testing: The QA team conducts functional testing after test case creation. This process ensures that main user workflows are carried out without any bugs or errors and that the features are implemented per requirements.
Functional Testing Checklist:
5. Database Testing: During database testing in the banking domain, a tester ensures that the app has data integrity, while QA specialists assess the database schema and data types, stored functions and procedures, and data loading speed. The process involves testing database objects like schemas, tables, views, triggers, and access controls.
The major focus of database testing is to ensure that the banking domain application can store and retrieve data from the database without data loss. It also ensures that the completed transactions are committed, and aborted transactions are reverted to avoid any mismatch in the stored data. Yet another crucial aspect that database testing verifies is that only authorized applications and users are given access to the database and the underlying tables.
Banking software and applications involve complex transactions that are performed both at UI and database levels. The complicated database is an entirely separate layer in the application. Hence, this crucial testing is carried out by database specialists.
Database testing involves techniques like:
6. Security Testing: Security testing ensures that the software has no security flaws. Security testing is highly critical for banking applications and software, as they are highly sensitive in nature. Also, developers must put in extra effort to protect user data from hacker attacks or fraudulent activities. During security testing, the QA team ensures that the application complies with the security regulations and standards, like Open Web Application Security Project, and exposes no sensitive data for public display. During test preparation, testing teams need to include negative and positive test scenarios to break into the system and report them before any unauthorized individual access it. However, to prevent hacking, the banking institution or financial service provider should also implement a multi-layer access validation, like a one-time password.
7. User Acceptance Testing: This testing is the final stage of all testing done to ensure the application's compliance with real-world scenarios. A software development team must be confident that real-world users will be satisfied with the application's functionalities. Hence, QA specialists assess the user acceptance of the application by asking a focus group to test it.
Banking domain applications have multiple users in the range of millions. Simulating such a high number of users may create a challenge for the testing team. Due to the presence of multiple users, it can be expected that they use different types of devices, connections, or even operating systems. Testing each combination of devices, OS, and connections is a complex and tedious process. Moreover, additional time and care are required to test bank applications, as they deal with money and sensitive information.
Also check: Performance Testing: An Ideal Process for Successful Applications
Web and mobile banking apps are becoming the most crucial platforms for financial institutions to interact with consumers effectively and build strong customer relationships that help retain them. Today, customers expect their online banking experiences to be just as smooth and easy as their in-person banking experiences. Thus, a website or app with weak security or a lackluster user experience can lead to poor customer satisfaction ratings, lower brand reputation, litigation, poor customer retention rates, and even loss of customers. Around 46% of the customers below the age of 55 years would switch banks for a better digital experience, according to the Mobiquity Digital Banking Report.
As of 2023, the global average cost of a data breach has risen to USD 4.45 million, reflecting a 15% increase over the past three years. Recent findings indicate that 51% of organizations are planning to boost their security investments in response to data breaches, directing resources toward incident response (IR) planning and testing, employee training, and the adoption of advanced threat detection and response tools. Notably, a study by IBM underscores the significance of swift incident response, revealing that organizations containing a breach in less than 200 days experience a cost savings of nearly 30%. This emphasizes the critical role of proactive measures in mitigating and minimizing the financial impact of data breaches.
Therefore, as so many factors remain at stake for the BFSI industry, banking domain application testing not only plays a crucial role in the banking software development lifecycle but also becomes crucial to maintaining positive customer relationships and upholding the institution's reputation.
HeadSpin solutions help your testing teams ensure your app's testing requirements are met, from functional, performance, and regression testing to guaranteeing mobile banking solutions' security, accessibility, compliance, and global consistency. Our teams are available to help you get the most out of your investment and assure optimal digital experiences for your customers.
Ans: Structural testing, functional testing, and non-functional testing.
Ans: HeadSpin Platform physically secures devices with an electronic lock and associated access audit log. BFSI organizations equipped with the HeadSpin solution can get an audit trail of all actions performed on devices and hosts. Also, with the help of a dedicated VPC, the Platform can control data access.
Ans: The main types of security testing include vulnerability testing, security scanning, penetration testing, security audit, risk assessment, ethical hacking, posture assessment, and SQL injection.
Ans: Structural testing involves testing database objects, like databases, schemas, tables, views, triggers, and access controls. This testing ensures that data types in tables are in sync with the corresponding variables in the application.
