Here are some Key Challenges of Financial Application testing:
Security, Regulatory and Compliance:
Security, Regulatory and Compliance:
As financial
applications involve transactions thus these are major targets of hacking and
other fraudulent activities. Regulations become critical in earlier banking
crisis as improper functioning of bank has a huge negative impact on its
customer. So financial institutions have to comply with international security
and standards such as “cross border payment”, “banking systemic risk and the
operational risks” which makes the testing of financial domain application very
important and challenging at the same time.
Omni-channel payment
and banking system: In today's world everyone is accepting the
concept of 24X7 banking and financial institutions are trying to launch digital
banks i.e. banks without branches. So here offering end to end functionality of
a regular bank on the minimal and highly diversified front-end of a mobile apps
is a key challenge.
Performance and Key services failures :
As
financial applications involve huge amount of transactions so performance
failures in finance portals can have a serious effect on its customers. In
order to meet the required performance levels involves taking into
consideration the infrastructure, connectivity, and integration with the back
end. Daily transactions shoud be monitored at regular intervals however Stress
and Load tests must also be regularly performed to ensure support for multiple
transactions at any given point of time.
Since
most of the applications in any finance domain are not standalone entity. They
are inter connected with other service providers e.g. forex trading software is
interconnected with banks to offer rates, third party vendor who provides
historical chart data for analyzing trading trends, funds transfer to/from
user's account using third party payment gateway. So it all needs precise
testing depending upon market simulation, volatility, dependency on third party
in order to make sure very action taken through the application is gone through
properly and in a defined channel which fulfills the ultimate requirement of
the software.
Transaction failure and Recovery
All type of the
finance application have certain type of transactions like amount transfer,
loan payment, sale/purchase of shares etc. Since transactions are all about
money flow from one account to another so
failure handling is very critical aspect of financial application.
For example if you
are if you are making any payment on your loan and due to some service failure
transaction failed which cause amount deducted from your bank account but
amount is not received at bank . If there will be no recovery process defined
for this failure then this will defiantly make customer panic as he will be
worried about his amount which is deducted from his account. We can’t stop
transaction failure 100% but we can reduce the impact by defining recovery
process. Like in above failure example on failure, if in recovery process
customer will get SMS/Email notifying him that he will get his failed payment
back in XYZ time then this can reduce the failure impact.
Lack of domain
specialization and expertise:
Banking,
Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) applications may be interacting with or
a part of different domain applications. So it becomes very crucial that a
tester is equipped with adequate knowledge of the domain that is being
involved. Skilled, Dedicated and Proficient resource pool is required for
financial application testing as transaction spikes must be monitored at
regular intervals for their secure passage over network.
