The Real-World Impact of Test Automation for Financial Services

When was the last time you went into a bank branch, met in-person with a stockbroker, visited your insurance agent’s office, or wrote a paper check? If you’re like most people, you now complete the vast majority of your daily financial tasks online or through an app:

The rise of the internet and smartphones over the past two decades has fundamentally transformed the financial services industry. What was science fiction in 1999– Your phone is your wallet! Bank tellers are chatbots! People pay with digital currencies instead of dollars! – are now normal facts of life. 

And with the rapid adoption of generative AI across financial services, it’s safe to assume the industry will be similarly transformed once again. Only this time, the transformation will happen in months, not decades. With new products, services, competitors, fintech security risks, and regulations to manage, finservs will need every tool at their disposal to keep pace. 

The best way to deliver quality applications faster is to integrate continuous testing across your software development lifecycle (SDLC). With test automation for financial services, you can catch more issues faster, increase compliance, improve the customer experience, and drive massive cost savings. Here’s what you need to know.

Finservs face several unique challenges when developing banking and financial software solutions that can deliver a consistent, high-quality experience. By leveraging continuous testing, you can overcome these challenges while building better products that attract customers and drive revenue. 

The financial services industry must navigate strict security and regulatory requirements like SOC 2, GDPR, and other data protection rules that lay out how to secure user data and financial transactions in precise detail. Every feature, update, and new digital product you create must undergo rigorous testing to ensure your code complies with all applicable regulations. 

A continuous quality approach lets you catch bugs that could impact your financial services compliance requirements earlier in the SDLC instead of waiting until production. In addition, automated testing helps you write more robust code the first time so that you don’t need to chase down vulnerabilities later. 

There are two things hackers want to get their hands on more than anything else: money and people’s personal financial data. Your organization likely has access to plenty of both, making financial services cybersecurity your top concern. 

In order to reduce your attack surface, you have to make sure your testing infrastructure is safe and secure. In addition to using testing infrastructure that is certified to meet regulatory requirements, you should use secure proxy tunnels to ensure that no sensitive data is leaked in transit. In addition, private test devices mean the devices you test on are only used by your team, further reducing the risk of accidental exposure. 

Creating quality code is difficult enough as it is. But on top of that, financial institutions have to make sure their code works on each and every device, operating system, and browser their customers use. If your digital experience only looks good on the latest iPhone, you run the risk of alienating a large portion of your customers. 

Automated testing makes it easier to manage a complex testing infrastructure by giving you access to all the devices you need to test your app without the hassle of managing the devices in-house. 

Customers rely on your apps to manage their most sensitive financial information. Any disruption, inconsistency, or errors will only put doubt in their mind, eroding the critical customer trust that is essential to maintaining loyalty. With half of financial service customers saying that they would switch providers due to a bad experience, your user experience has a direct impact on customer lifetime value. While many finserv solutions are designed to be sticky, issues like visual inconsistencies or functional bugs can still gradually drive users away–or at the very least make them unlikely to recommend your solution to others.

Test automation helps you identify visual and functional bugs that manual testing might miss, particularly when evaluating how your digital experience is delivered across different devices and operating systems. By ensuring that your user experience is engaging and consistent, you can build loyalty and encourage customers to spend more time with your app.

Test automation helps financial institutions deliver reliable, secure, and user-friendly digital experiences much more effectively and efficiently than manual testing alone. Here’s how test automation can help your financial services organization deliver new products, manage updates, and maintain its competitive edge. 

Test automation allows finservs to use both real and virtual devices like emulators and simulators to ensure complete test coverage across device types, operating systems, and browsers. The more you can scale your test coverage, the earlier in the SDLC you can integrate findings and resolve bugs sooner. Improving scalability also allows you to run more tests for things like:

Because manual testing is well - manual, mistakes and critical errors can be overlooked. Automated testing minimizes the odds of a bug getting missed by systematically executing tests according to your exact standards. As a result, you can get more consistent and reliable test results, ensuring that your app’s functionality, visual experience, and security meet your specific requirements. 

With test automation, finservs can shift testing left to help developers find and remediate issues sooner, in addition to uncovering the root cause of issues that may create multiple bugs later. By making fixes faster and sooner, test automation helps finservs accelerate their time to market for new features, in addition to helping them push critical updates to their users sooner. In addition, it can help you improve the overall level of code quality by expanding test coverage and eliminating the root cause of bugs.

Test automation ensures that all your code meets the requirements of SOC 2, GDPR, and other regulations so you meet your compliance requirements without the need for lengthy code reviews. It can also help you test your code against your internal security protocols so that new features continue to keep your customer data safe from the risk of a security incident.  

For most customers, their phone is their new bank branch. This means you need to ensure a consistent, quality digital experience no matter the device or operating system they use. Automated testing can help you test your apps and website on thousands of real and virtual device/OS/browser combinations so you can uncover any unique bugs that could impact subsets of users.  

Because manual testing is so time-consuming, it leaves developers with less time to work on new and innovative projects. In fact, inefficient testing processes can cost up to 38% in additional FTE time – that’s 15 hours per week per developer. Automated testing helps you get that time back, so you can keep your highest-paid staff focused on developing new features that can generate new revenue and help retain existing customers. By helping you save more than 90% in developer and QA testing time, studies show that an automated testing solution can generate 217% ROI and deliver payback in less than six months.

Sauce Labs provides the only enterprise-ready automated testing platform that financial services organizations need to incorporate testing across the SLDC:

With more than 15 years of experience working with top financial organizations, Sauce Labs gives banks, fintechs, insurance providers, and other financial services businesses a single-platform approach needed to streamline test automation, run thousands of parallel tests, and catch bugs before they reach production.

Want to see what Sauce Labs can do for your organization? Check out this recent case study featuring the financial planning software developer eMoney Advisors. They went from zero mobile app automation to a comprehensive automated test strategy, allowing the company to:

Thanks to rapid digital adoption by customers, the rise of new AI capabilities, and the need to keep pace with ever-stringent financial services security and regulatory requirements, finservs need to deliver a digital experience that is engaging, reliable, and secure. 

With test automation, you can adapt to changing customer needs and increase your innovation velocity while improving your engineering efficiency and reducing risk. For tips on how to use test automation to deliver a quality mobile experience, check out our eBook: A Comprehensive Checklist for Optimizing Your Mobile Banking App.