Today’s smartphones are laden with apps: from games to virtual assistants and streaming music services. Fintech apps, however, unmistakably stand out.
Services like banking, budgeting, investment, mobile payments, insurance, and equity funding, fintech applications require access to sensitive personal and financial data.
This makes them highly demanding in terms of security and resistance to phishing and hacker attacks, and places even higher demands on fintech app testing.
Although application security is a top priority for the fintech industry, meeting a range of other requirements is equally crucial to an app’s success.
For example, reliability – the capability to handle simultaneous and large-scale transactions and non-disruptive performance, seamless integration with other apps and systems, agility.
The overall quality of user experience will ultimately drive customer choice and make them favour your app over many similar ones.
In fact, recent research has indicated that the mode in which services are delivered matters to users as much as the services themselves.
This is what makes quality assurance of fintech apps so important. The QA tests will not only help eliminate bugs and security loopholes, but will also ensure better usability and regulatory compliance, and even speed up application development.
QA testing plays an important part in guaranteeing optimal functionality, accessibility, and data protection.
Of course, the best results can only be achieved if quality assurance testing is implemented in the early stages of fintech app development.
Starting as early as building application logic, or better yet, at the stage of building a secure app infrastructure, will help integrate security into every stage of the application development process.
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FinTech QA Challenges
Surely, great responsibility implies facing numerous challenges involved in secure fintech application development. Below is the list of demands fintech companies have to meet to ensure top-notch quality.
Large-scale integrations
A good fintech app is expected to integrate with a number of external applications. For example, contacting a third-party payment system could be necessary to process a transaction.
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Multi-tier functionality
Fintech app users will require multiple processes to operate simultaneously, and multi-tier functionality enables thousands of sessions can run concurrently.
Data storage and protection
Fintech apps need ample storage capacities to store users’ data. Needless to say, they also have to provide excellent data protection with complex passwords, 2-way authentications, multi-step approvals, etc.
Supporting multiple and large-scale transactions
Fintech applications have to support multiple transactions happening every second – some of them are quite massive. The app should be able to automatically block a suspicious transaction if the activity it detects is labelled as suspicious. It also needs a robust disaster recovery system to ensure non-disruptive performance.
Accessibility
An excellent fintech application should support multilingual users, users with disabilities, and users from different time-zones and locations. It also should be accessible from different devices, operating systems, and platforms.
Regulatory compliance
Fintech applications should also ensure every transaction they support complies with local and international regulations.
5 Methods of Testing Fintech Software Solutions
Although fintech as an industry is still in its infancy, it already applies a vast array of QA testing approaches. All in all, there are five QA testing methods for meeting the quality requirements mentioned above:
1. Security testing
Applied to test your app for any potential flaws in the security system, security testing involves the so-called ‘penetration testing’– imitating hacker attacks to test your application frontend and backend for vulnerabilities.
2. Automated testing
Fintech app testing is an iterative process; yet, you don’t have to carry out all tests manually. Automatic checks for most frequent user workflows will help you capture and eliminate potential errors.
3. Compliance testing
This set of techniques tests regulatory compliance. As fintech evolves as an industry, so do regulations (for example, the GDPR in the EU). Hence, fintech developers have to run compliance tests frequently and on a regular basis.
4. Accessibility testing
This type of testing ensures your fintech solution is accessible to all user groups, including people with disabilities and impairments. Often missed out at early fintech development stages, accessibility testing ensures your app caters to a broad scope of users, which is surely a competitive advantage.
5. Regression testing
This type of testing is necessary after introducing a new feature or set of features to make sure they have been integrated successfully without disrupting the overall app performance.
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Outsourced QA of FinTech Apps
So why do many fintech companies leverage outsourced fintech QA? Today, a generally accepted QA testing procedure in fintech starts with gathering requirements and involves seven consequent steps:
- Requirement gathering;
- Reviewing requirements;
- Listing the most frequently used business scenarios;
- Functional testing;
- Database testing;
- Security testing, as well as the final, user acceptance testing stage needed to find out if the application has the potential to gain acknowledgement of the end-users.
Each step requires extensive knowledge of fintech solutions development specifics, a good understanding of application and database architecture, as well as expertise in fintech sub-industries, such as for example, insurance tech.
Fintech app security is a serious issue. Data breaches and cybercrimes are the hallmarks of today’s digital culture; moreover, they can easily hit the news because they usually happen on a large-scale. By neglecting security, Fintech companies jeopardize their reputation and put their entire business at stake.
Fintech QA testing, however, doesn’t have to be costly and painstaking, as fin-tech app QA outsourcing obviates the need to headhunt and recruit expensive local talent and offers a wide range of models for successful collaboration.
