Top 5 Factors to Consider While Testing Financial Applications

A report by Mordor Intelligence estimates that the Financial Services Application Market will clock USD 146.65 billion in 2024 and USD 271.75 billion by 2029, growing at a CAGR of 13.13% during the forecast period (2024-2029). Today, a country’s strength is estimated by the robustness of its economy and allied financial systems. Ensuring the security and accessibility of financial applications is critical, which has increased the significance of Financial Applications Testing and Quality Assurance—security testing, Functional testing, Load/Performance testing, and more.

Financial technology organizations (commonly referred to as Fintechs) emerged as a craze in 2015, and start-ups raised large amounts of funds from banks and financial institutions to develop innovative platforms to make financial services more accessible and user-friendly. The key concern areas have been performance, security, and functionality.

Testing financial applications is becoming complex as they are becoming more multi-layered due to growing third-party connections. A financial application facilitates the management of business processes for financial transactions. It is designed to automate, enable, and store sensitive financial data securely.

Financial Services applications manage the overall storage of sensitive data, analysis, management, and processing of various financial transactions, data sets, and information to deliver a robust platform for the end users.

Financial software is designed for financial information management and can run independently or as a component of a financial information system. It is built for personal and business purposes and comprises basic financial data management, financial transactions and management, budgeting, and financial asset management.

A Financial Application is built with multi-tier functionality to serve multiple concurrent users/user sessions, even on a large scale. A banking/financial application integrates with other regulatory or supplementary applications, namely, payment gateway services, merchants, and trading accounts.

Financial application processing entails multiple integration points and generates complex business workflows. It further involves Real-Time and Batch Processing with volumes of transactions per second, which typically makes software testing for financial applications complex.

Can you imagine loading your sensitive data on an application whose security is questionable and whose performance is not as expected?

Security and performance are crucial for financial services applications. Despite significant funding, fintech startups often struggle to maintain secure and up-to-date platforms, highlighting the necessity of thorough testing of financial applications.

5 Things to consider while testing Financial/Banking applications:

Impact Analysis

It involves analyzing the effect of the changes on the deployed application. It focuses on the application features that could possibly and indirectly be impacted by the changes and might require scrupulous regression testing. This decision and analysis are generally done as a team.

The team involved in the financial application’s testingis expected to identify and eventually fix areas that could be affected. This technique is called selective re-testing, as it focuses on reusing the existing test cases that have already been executed.

Functional Testing

Functional testing is an essential aspect of software testing for financial applications. It is important to test the system thoroughly and check all source codes and architecture for bugs or vulnerabilities.

Functional testing of financial applications comprises the regular software testing activities: Test Case Preparation, Test Case Review, and Test Case execution. It can also involve Application testing, System Integration testing, Regression testing, and User Acceptance Testing.

Security Testing

Security Testing in finance application testingis normally considered towards the end of the testing cycle after completing functional and non-functional aspects of the application. However, the dynamics and processes need to change with time. Financial applications enable the trade of millions of dollars in the form of stocks, goods, currency, and more.

Youmust watch out for financial breaches and proactively take care of sensitive areas. Security testing helps you check for vulnerabilities and address them in compliance with Federal and industry standards. It helps check vulnerabilities across every platform, Including Web browsers and Mobile Applications.

Performance Testing

Testing Financial services applications is imperative as theyventure into diverse markets and products, which requires more judgment of the expected load on the application. This drives the need for performance testing across the development lifecycle. It helps estimate, test, and manage the system load and build the application accordingly.

Applications must adapt to the changing economic ecosystem and fast-paced application development cycles. Performance testing has key benefits: monitoring and reporting, enhanced productivity, reduced costs, and reduced downtime. All in all, this helps ensure enhanced quality and a better customer experience.

Test Automation

Most financial services applications require rigorous testing and experience many different scenarios. Test Automation makes the process iterative and eliminates errors that can occur due to manual efforts. This can be done with automated test scripts/frameworks.

This will ensure all user interactions are tested and enable the team to achieve enhanced test coverage. Test Automation can be implemented across different software testing activities, such as performance/stress, security, and functional testing.

The objective is to make the process faster, sustain quality, and achieve maximum test coverage.

Improving software testing in financial services with a proactive approach and effective risk management enhances the efficiency and robustness of financial applications.It is a challenging space, thanks to the wider scope and reach of the applications in the economic sphere.

Cigniti’s Advisory and Transformation Services help enterprises and innovative business ventures to focus on Quality Assurance and Testing aspects – people, tools, and infrastructure across the delivery lifecycle.

Connect with us to transform your QA practices and devise the right strategy to test your complex and business-critical applications.