The world of banking is continuously evolving, but the pursuit of revenue optimization will always be a paramount objective. Critical to achieving this is the efficiency and effectiveness of software applications across the entire customer credit lifecycle.
In this blog, we explore how Keysight Eggplant’s unique cross-platform human vision test automation, AI-driven model-based testing, and usability testing capabilities turbo-charge the quantity and quality of software testing. We’ll examine how it empowers financial institutions to achieve testing and reporting in one unified chain. And we’ll discover how it helps to deliver high-quality, customer-centric solutions that give institutions a competitive edge. In other words, we’ll look at how it can significantly amplify revenue growth for financial institutions.
Four Areas That Pose Software Testing Challenges for Banks
Research for the American Bankers Association shows that customers want and expect to use a variety of ways to deal with their bank: 48% use apps on their phones or other mobile devices, 23% bank via their laptop or PC, 9% still want to visit a branch, 8% use ATMs, and 5% use telephone banking.
What’s more, as digital banking continues to grow in popularity and the number of physical branches continues to decline, if institutions want to drive revenue growth, it is more important than ever to ensure applications deliver a high-quality user experience while also being inclusive and compliant with accessibility standards.
Salesforce research from 2023 found that 25% of customers had switched banks, 35% had switched insurers, and 34% had switched wealth managers in the previous 12 months. The top reason customers gave for switching was a desire for a better digital experience.
Yet achieving a high-quality user experience is easier said than done. Underpinning every interface is an applications ‘iceberg’: an intricate technological environment involving a complex tech stack. There are mainframes, mobile technologies, and internal customer management software solutions. Some may be at the cutting edge; others may be legacy applications.
Not only does each system and application need to work seamlessly and effortlessly in and of itself, the overall end-to-end experience needs to be similarly seamless. In other words, as the customer – or the internal team member – switches from system to system or device to device, there must be no loss of performance or quality.
To understand why this is so important and what’s at stake, let’s take just four scenarios that have a direct impact on revenue generation to understand what’s involved.
-
The Loan Origination Process
It’s vital that a new customer’s first experience of a bank is a positive one. But a typical loan application process cuts across multiple devices and multiple systems. From customer-facing interfaces to internal case management systems, there are plenty of opportunities for the experience to let the customer down. -
Account Management Activity
Effective account management is crucial for customer retention and revenue optimization. The ability to monitor customer accounts and target messaging across multiple platforms can make the difference between a happy customer keen to take out new products and an unhappy customer considering suing for bad advice or poor practice. -
Collections and Payment Processes
A streamlined payment collection process enhances efficiency and effectiveness, generating revenue. But this efficiency and effectiveness depends on timely and targeted messaging, straightforward processes and multiple systems working together perfectly to deliver an outstanding user experience. -
End-to-End System Validation
Consider two-factor authentication, including the receipt of an SMS token on a mobile device while logging into a web application, which is a vital step to ensures security and builds trust. Or to take another scenario, a customer interacting with the core banking system via the customer-facing online banking system. Ensuring multiple systems work together seamlessly to give an effortless user experience is vital – and easier said than done.
Given the complexities involved, testing any one of these areas is a challenging task for the QA team. Traditional testing tools help, but they have their limitations. Perhaps the biggest issue is that they may only test a single system. This increases the tech stack even more because of the requirement to add multiple testing tools into the mix. It also increases the requirement for specialist staff skilled in specific platforms. They likely test at an object level too, which raises several more issues.
Take a text box on a webpage, for example. Standard testing software will check and pass the code. But what it doesn’t know is that the text box is being displayed on-screen at just one pixel wide, so it’s effectively useless.
There are also the well-rehearsed security concerns with testing in live environments. Plus, the reality of modern software is that it involves automatic updates that will play havoc with object-based testing scripts. But this is just the beginning. Multiple tools mean multiple reports. Pulling together these reports to assess the quality of the end-to-end process is complex and time-consuming. Even more worryingly, coverage isn’t complete because the hand-off from system to system in the process isn’t being tested.
This means it’s hard to provide a complete audit trail. There’s the additional complication of coding languages that are hard for non-specialists to understand. Even if it were easy to provide a complete audit trail, could it be handed to a team of auditors without further explanation? But if these are the challenges, what is the solution?
Keysight Eggplant offers visual automation, AI-driven model-based testing, and accessibility testing capabilities that give financial institutions the tools they need to enhance testing coverage and drive revenue growth through an improved customer experience.
Find out more about Automated Testing Platform for Financial Services.
The Eggplant Answer
The Value of Visual Automation
Unlike tools that require source code access to test, Eggplant tests visually, effectively seeing what the user sees. It’s a non-invasive approach that removes concerns. It also means its tests are unaffected by updates to the system under test because it’s testing the model not the object code.
Visual testing means Eggplant can test any software on any device, operating system, or browser. It means it can test everything from customer-facing services to critical back-office operations, providing a comprehensive solution with the unique ability to consolidate testing across business units. Crucially, it removes the fear about what happens during hand-offs. It ensures that banking applications function seamlessly and provide visually accessible and satisfying customer experiences, which in turn drives increased customer engagement and revenue growth.
The Power of Model-Based Testing Eggplant uses a model-based testing approach instead of an object-level approach. It enables teams to build frameworks for applications, which brings multiple benefits.
It makes it easier to create and manage test cases and facilitates ‘click-to-create’ test case variation. It enables the reuse of test cases and test steps, which streamlines maintenance requirements. Streamlining testing activity in this way reduces operational costs, allows for improved coverage and accuracy, and positively affects revenue performance.
Enhancing Test Coverage and Reporting
Eggplant seamlessly integrates into a DevOps toolchain to streamline the release process, enhance test coverage on the go, and contribute to revenue growth through its ability to support high-quality, customer-centric applications.
It works using the English-like coding language SenseTalk, which means it’s easier to learn, reducing time-to-value and removing the need to recruit and retain testers with specialist knowledge in specific coding languages or in specific test tools. The end-to-end testing capabilities deliver an end-to-end audit trail, and a single report to evidence it. Plus, because it uses SenseTalk, it’s easier for external stakeholders to understand the output.
The reporting capabilities extend to assessing test coverage too, because the model is able to advise on the percentage of possible permutations that are being tested. It opens up the opportunity to go far beyond functional testing into exploratory testing and UI testing that can genuinely add value to the customer experience and the potential to generate revenue.
See the Value in Practice
St. James’s Place (SJP) is one of the UK’s largest, advice-led wealth management companies and advises over 917,000 clients on investments and all aspects of financial services. The company uses Eggplant as a key component of its testing strategy.
Andrew Young, Delivery Director at Intellect, who worked with St James’s Place to implement the software, comments:
“Eggplant tests on a UI level …. For example, a button that was visible on the code layer but hidden to the user on a UI perspective. It’s crucial to provide a frictionless experience to customers, especially when they are trying to access important information, such as the balance of their retirement funds.”
What’s more, its ability to test continually and at speed saves thousands of hours of human testing time and contributes directly to the bottom line. Andrew Young notes:
“In 2021, we ran a combined total of 2,261 days of regression automation across the whole of SJP using Eggplant, which saved them over £500k. At the beginning of the year, I set up a stretch target of 3,000 days. We finished 2022 on 3,730 days saving over £900k by using Eggplant Test Automation.”
Financial institutions face a host of unique, interrelated, and interdependent software testing challenges that all affect their ability to optimize revenue. Through its innovative testing solutions, Eggplant helps financial institutions ensure high-quality, customer-centric applications throughout the entire customer credit lifecycle. This elevates customer experiences and enhances institutions’ position in the market, therefore driving the revenue optimization required.