The key challenges and risks in quality assurance and testing in banking and financial services
Introduction
Traditional development approaches introduce bottlenecks to releasing quality software at speed. Agile methods are helping to address that issue. However, newly-created product teams using Agile and DevOps methods for delivery, commonly experience difficulty in completing testing in Sprints. On top of that, the IT skills shortage is affecting firms globally. In a competitive market, these factors are having a negative impact on getting quality products and services to market.
Introduction
The Banking and Financial Services industry is complex, high-profile and highly sensitive by nature. Enormously complex systems of financial technology today—spanning the globe—need to exhibit perfect quality not just risk management or compliance checks but also end-user trust in their operation. So, it is important for organisations to choose a quality assurance partner who will ensure their systems deliver at the highest levels of performance.
In this magazine-style video publication, we discuss quality assurance factors that must be considered by banks and financial services organisations in order to deliver the highest quality products and services. We also highlight some of our client's key challenges—and how they overcame them!
Watch the video to hear the insights shared from our Testhouse experts and clients
What are the major challenges that banking and financial services leaders must overcome to deliver successful products?
Andrew Holmes, Non-Executive Director at Birmingham Bank, points out: “Typically execs are under a significant amount of pressure from the Board, shareholders and others to ensure they can get products, services and solutions out as rapidly as possible. However, we’ve seen where, because of that pressure, corners can be potentially cut.”
Michael Harriman, Senior Advisor - Information Technology, Redwood Bank and CIO for challenger bank Alba, says: “One of the challenges is to maintain a fully operationally resilient environment on a 24/7 basis. That operational resilience is not just to assist the customer, there's also a regulatory requirement whereby we must be operationally resilient and make sure that the customer’s data is protected.”
He adds: ”There's a key challenge around quality assurance and how much quality can be automated.”
"The quality assurance element is paramount for any customer experience within a digital bank. So from a quality perspective, near enough is not good enough.”
Michael Harriman
Senior Advisor - Information Technology REDWOOD BANK
