Banks and financial service providers are facing digital upheaval. As the days of traditional banking fade, digital banking is taking over. Digitalization is no longer something you can put off, it’s happening now, with banking applications and services taking center stage.
This makes effective financial application testing necessary.
Testing financial applications ensures they’re secure, reliable, and ready to meet both customer expectations and industry regulations for preventing fraud and safeguarding funds and data.
This blog gives you an overview of the ten essential types of testing you should perform to safeguard the performance, security, and resilience of your digital banking apps. From security and compliance to usability and disaster recovery, these tests help protect both your app and your customers in an increasingly digital world.
Ready to dive in?
Functional testing
This helps ensure every feature of your banking app performs according to set specifications. It involves verifying core processes such as:
Fund transfers
Testing domestic and international fund transfers to ensure correct execution and transaction logs.
Loan processing
Ensuring loan applications, approvals, and disbursements work correctly in your app.
Payments and settlements
Evaluating your app’s ability to:
- Handle payments
- Verify payments
- Process settlements
- Manage transaction reversals (without errors)
Validating core functions like logging in and balance inquiries is essential to avoid operational failures and customer dissatisfaction.
Security testing
In a highly regulated sector such as finance, stringent security is a top concern.
The role of security testing is to identify vulnerabilities in your banking app. This helps protect the data your app handles and verifies your app complies with security standards.
You should test these key aspects:
Encryption and decryption
Make sure all sensitive customer information, such as card numbers and personal details, is encrypted during transactions.
Authentication mechanisms
Help prevent any kind of unauthorised access by evaluating:
- Two-factor authentication (2FA)
- Biometrics
- Other access control measures in your app
Penetration testing
In pen tests, you can simulate cyberattacks to help you find security loopholes that hackers may exploit.
In a world rife with cyber threats, security testing is a necessary measure that helps you safeguard data and prevent financial fraud.
Performance testing
Unlike physical bank branches, banking apps are tasked with high volumes of transactions, especially during peak times like month-end or tax season. Key performance tests include:
Load tests
These tests verify how your app handles large user loads. You can simulate high transaction volumes to assess system behaviour. This helps you avoid system slowdowns or crashes.
Stress tests
These push your system beyond normal operational limits. The purpose is to test the system's resilience and response to extreme stress conditions.
Scalability tests
These determine the application’s ability to scale up or down depending on user demand or growth in service offerings.
Overall, performance testing helps ensure your app remains fast and responsive under any load.
Compliance testing
The financial industry is under the highest scrutiny in terms of regulations and standards. Compliance testing helps ensure your app adheres to all these standards. This includes regulations such as:
PCI DSS
The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard is in place to secure card transactions. It has a huge role in protecting against card-payment-related fraud.
GDPR
The General Data Protection Regulation governs how personal data is handled, stored, and deleted. It's an important data privacy-related regulation from the EU.
SOX
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act is a U.S. law that aims to enhance accuracy in financial reporting. It requires companies to put in place internal controls and measures for financial data integrity.
Compliance with regulations is necessary if you wish to avoid legal penalties and maintain customer trust.
Integration testing
Your banking app will interact with a wide array of other systems. These could be both internal and third-party services. Integration testing is important for your app to ensure its seamless interactions with:
Payment gateways
Verify correct integration with third-party payment processors, including handling payment disputes.
External databases
Test integrations with credit score databases or fraud detection systems. This will ensure seamless data exchange.
APIs
Ensure secure and proper communication between various internal and external APIs.
The goal of integration testing is a harmonious system where all components work together without any issues. This creates a smooth experience for users while maintaining a robust performance for back-end systems.
User acceptance testing
Before your banking software goes live, it must pass several user acceptance tests. These are a set of evaluations where the actual end-users of your app put it through its paces in real-world scenarios. This helps ensure the following:
Usability
Testing whether customers can easily navigate the application, complete transactions, and access services.
Satisfaction
This involves gathering feedback from real users. They tell you if and how much the app met their expectations and if it was able to deliver its promised functionality.
Business requirements
Users validate that your software meets business needs and objectives.
UAT is an important testing strategy that guarantees your app's readiness for deployment. It's the last-chance saloon for addressing any user concerns or interface issues before your app goes public.
Regression testing
Every banking app needs frequent updates and patches. Regression testing helps ensure any new features or fixes don’t break existing functionalities in your app. This is extremely crucial for maintaining stability and compatibility.
You must ensure there are no disruptions in critical services after updates. You must also verify the system remains compatible with various OSs, browsers, and devices post-updates.
Automated regression testing is one way you can accelerate the testing process. It helps you ensure robust performance with every release.
Data migration testing
As part of embracing all things digital, banks need to update systems or switch platforms. During this process they need to move vast amounts of sensitive data. Data migration testing ensures the following:
Data integrity
Verify no data is lost, duplicated, or corrupted during the move.
Security
Data migration should follow secure protocols and ensure sensitive information remains protected.
Performance
You must also test the migration process’s impact on the system’s performance. This ensures it remains efficient during and after migration.
Data migration testing helps you maintain operational continuity during system upgrades or migrations.
Usability testing
Your banking app caters to a broad audience. This includes customers with varying levels of tech knowledge. So, your usability testing must focus on:
Ease of navigation
Ensure your customers can navigate through the app. They must be able to make transactions or find valuable information easily.
Customer experience
Test the design, layout, and interaction flow in your app. By doing this, you can ensure the app is intuitive and user-friendly.
Usability testing helps boost customer satisfaction, reducing drop-off rates and increasing adoption.
Disaster recovery testing
Disaster recovery testing is a measure every bank must take to safeguard its business continuity. As a bank operating in an uncertain world, you must be prepared for worst-case scenarios. This includes situations like data breaches or system failures. The goal is to ensure that in any uncertain event your backups work, and you can recover systems promptly.
Verify that all your data can be restored from backups efficiently and accurately. Evaluate how fast your system can restore normal functioning after a disruption.
Make sure to have failover mechanisms that minimize downtime.
Key takeaways
Customer trust rests heavily on the performance of your banking apps.
This means testing your digital banking apps is no longer optional. With these apps handling critical daily transactions, failure can be catastrophic leading to huge financial losses, reputational damage, and loss of customer loyalty. So, don’t settle for just any testing services.
If you’re not sure your in-house resources can meet the challenge, a specialist banking software testing service company can help iron out your testing processes. Be sure to choose a provider specialising in software testing services for the financial industry that boasts experienced quality engineers. With effective financial application testing, you can deliver a seamless experience to your customers and maintain their trust in your services.
