Dzmitry Lubneuski is the CIO at a1qa, a leading pure-play software testing company. He’s a tech expert with a solid 20-year background in QA
Post-release software defects almost always have a negative impact on business reputation. Within the financial industry, the situation becomes even more challenging. As I’ve observed across the industry, the improper operation of IT products can cause delayed transactions, data breaches, declines in user trust or legal issues.
Most often, I’ve found software failures emerge when technology, operational and compliance risks go unnoticed. This is why quality engineering should become an essential part of risk management for any organization.
In this article, I’ll analyze why it’s vital to comprehensively test your fintech software—and explain how to do it with confidence.
The Top Five Technical Hurdles Fintech Companies Grapple With
As the CIO of a leading pure-play software testing company, I’ve learned that project teams should keep five important risks top-of-mind:
1. Transaction Integrity: If you use smart contracts and blockchain-driven solutions, any payments performed using them can’t be rolled back. So, if an issue occurs within them, it will be impossible to rectify it.
2. Security And Fraud Risks: From arithmetic errors and access control vulnerabilities to business logic issues and price oracle manipulation, any problems missed during smart contract creation can lead to financial and reputational losses for your IT product.
3. Regulatory Compliance: The financial industry is known for its strict regulations applied in various geographical regions. If organizations don’t put sufficient effort into adhering to these compliance requirements, they may face long-standing legal consequences.
4. Ecosystem Integrations: Present-day fintech solutions rarely work in isolation and are often integrated with various third-party services. If quality control is insufficient, numerous data synchronization, authentication and other issues can occur.
5. Scalability And Performance Expectations: Users nowadays can choose from a wide variety of solutions available on the market, and they often strive for excellence and have very high standards. A 2022 survey from the Federal Reserve states that more than three-quarters of respondents would like to access quicker transactions, while more than 60% want to instantly see their financial data. This demand for excellence has, in my experience, only increased in recent years since the survey’s publication.
It’s crucial to remember that any quality control objective isn’t only about finding defects but also mitigating risks before they impact end users. This includes scrutinizing every update in the earliest SDLC stages possible to ensure your application can operate seamlessly under various real-time conditions.
I’ve found that this practice can contribute to more informed decision-making during the software creation process, reduce the probability of expensive post-release issues and boost users’ confidence in the IT products they use.
Meticulous QA Is The Cornerstone Of Fintech Robustness
To prevent unpleasant consequences and ensure no glitches spoil the customer experience, I would urge business leaders to consider the following software testing best practices:
Performance Testing
Performance testing can help you gauge whether IT products can seamlessly operate under a high influx of concurrent users. To verify this, I’ve found it’s a good idea to conduct various verifications depending on your business goals. For instance, stress and spike testing can help you check your software’s ability to handle extreme situations. Concurrency simulations can help you understand if your system can successfully operate when leveraged by thousands of people in parallel. Low-latency tests can check if your applications can perform necessary tasks while meeting your required timeframe.
For example, by relying on performance testing, one U.S.-based fintech innovator we worked with that developed SaaS billing software attained a tenfold performance increase for one-time transactions.
Security Testing
With the help of security testing, QA teams can protect their fintech IT solutions from various fraudulent attacks, thus building end-user trust.
To this end, software testers should run penetration tests to understand whether a piece of fintech software has any loopholes that can provide malicious intruders with unauthorized access. Testers should also check that the software has the necessary mechanisms that allow it to react promptly to any strange or suspicious behavior. In addition, it’s important to verify that the IT product’s APIs don’t provide any opportunities for malicious actors to access the financial data of users.
One fintech organization we worked with managed to ensure compliance with PCI DSS requirements by relying on thorough security verifications.
Resilience Testing
By relying on resilience testing, companies can gain confidence in knowing that their IT products will be able to recover after they’ve gone through any type of crash.
As part of this activity, QA testers should conduct failover verifications to see if the system can switch to backup components without disruptions. With recovery tests, they can see if applications can gracefully return to normal operations. Moreover, they can gauge how interconnected services behave under failure conditions, detecting issues that may cause outages in fintech solutions.
Smart Contract Testing
This QA activity is of utmost importance, as it assists QA teams in confirming the fail-safe operation of contracts in financial applications. Most importantly, software testing engineers must check their logic to avert any operational disruptions or financial losses. They must also make use of edge-case and negative scenario testing to confirm that the contract fails safely when something unusual or wrong happens.
In addition, specialists must validate how contracts interact with one another to make sure no flaws occur.
QA Must Play First Fiddle For Fintech Success
Although many project teams today are forced to release software solutions as soon as possible to remain competitive and support innovation at speed, doing this may still come at the expense of quality. Considering that failures in fintech software can pose numerous threats, it’s important that this race for speed doesn’t affect end users.
To avoid any negative consequences, companies must strengthen their development workflows with rigorous software testing. They can also leverage AI to assist with test cases, data generation, results analysis, defect forecasting and predictive test planning to ensure the stable operation of IT products, minimize business risks and scale smoothly.
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