The Green Sheet Online Edition
January 1, 2025 • 25:01:01
Effective payments testing: DIY versus getting the experts in
DIY or do-it-yourself is a common approach when trying to save money. It's usually a reference linked to home improvements but can equally apply to wider situations. DIY payment testing is a phenomenon in the financial services sector, but at what risk?
At the outset it may seem like a good idea for a bank's in-house team to do significant manual testing or use legacy technology, but like any other resource-challenged project, payment testing of this kind can be at higher risk of glitches and go spectacularly wrong.
Any testing error can inflict significant pain on a bank and its customers both in monetary and reputational terms. Payment testing needs to be flawless. Getting external, expert testing resources involved from the get-go, to support the in-house team, is considered a must by many.
Benefits to outsourced payments testing
Financial institutions using a specialist, outsourced payments testing option can benefit in a number of key ways:
- Enhanced accuracy and reliability: Specialist external solutions are designed specifically for the complex requirements of payment systems. They provide industry-standard testing capabilities that reduce human error, improve test coverage and ensure that transactions perform as expected across a variety of scenarios and payment rails.
Recent technological advances are being leveraged for the first time to build platforms that can truly address the complexities of a modern payment system.
- Cost and time efficiency: Building and maintaining a sophisticated in-house testing environment is often costly and time-consuming. Specialist, external solutions can streamline the process for your in-house team, automate repetitive tasks, and reduce the need for extensive manual testing, actually saving money and resources.
There are four stages to using payment testing solutions successfully:
- Test creation (a human, creative approach is recommended using your internal expertise to implement)
- Set-up (can be repetitive, time consuming and prone to error)
- Test execution (is "Fiddly", time taking, and can be easily automated)
- Test result analysis (can be automated, leaving more time for the good stuff, which is a human taking a critical view of what has really taken place during testing and its impact).
If you can get stages 2 and 3 to near zero and add automation to stage 4 using an externally created, cutting edge testing solution, then you can better utilize the expertise in your own team to do what they should be doing: creating great test cases and tweaking and evolving them based on the results they observe.
- Up-to-date compliance and standards: Payment ecosystems must comply with strict regulatory standards (for example, PCI DSS, SEPA and ISO 20022). Specialist testing providers are generally quick to incorporate updates to meet new regulations and industry standards, ensuring compliance and reducing the risk of costly regulatory issues.
- Improved security and fraud prevention: Current payment testing solutions are built with a focus on security and fraud prevention, using robust testing methods to simulate real-world threats. This ensures that the institution's payment systems are resilient against security vulnerabilities and fraud risks.
- Scalability and flexibility: As financial institutions scale or adapt to new payment types, currencies or platforms, specialist testing solutions offer the flexibility to adjust quickly. These solutions often provide cloud-based or modular testing capabilities that allow financial institutions to scale up or down based on business needs.
Technologies such as ISO20022 and API evolve at a rate of knots. Unless you can manage multiple versions of many interlinked components, you are in trouble. This should be a key feature/component of a product or platform based payments testing approach.
- Advanced reporting and analytics: Specialist tools offer sophisticated analytics and reporting features, allowing institutions to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs), identify issues early, and make data-driven decisions to enhance system performance and reliability.
Some companies using outsourced services test continually without manual intervention. They automatically get a warning signal if an element of the payment system being tested breaks or something goes wrong. Thorough, automated testing and quality assurance gets baked in so it's not an afterthought or something that gets squeezed out as projects inevitably run late.
- Faster time-to-market: Leveraging a specialist provider helps institutions speed up the testing process, accelerating the launch of new products and services. This is crucial for staying competitive in a rapidly evolving payments market where consumers expect instant, seamless and secure payment experiences.
Nothing should go live in payments without being tested to the best of your capabilities. The price of getting a new payment product to market even a week early can generate millions of dollars. Thorough payments testing can help achieve this.
Partnering with a proven payments testing provider
Specialist payments testing solutions from a leading supplier provide a more reliable, efficient and cost-effective approach to ensuring that payment systems meet high standards for performance, security, and compliance. This allows financial institutions to focus on core business activities while delivering a superior customer experience.
Also, effective payment testing remains key to the future health of all banks and financial institutions the world over – partnering with a progressive, specialist provider will bring peace of mind in a rapidly changing, technologically driven, financial services environment. With a proven payment testing product you will also get the distilled experience that went into building it, leveraging expertise which is clearly of benefit.
Anthony Walton is the CEO of Iliad Solutions, a company that has over 25 years of experience in payments and prides itself on being at the forefront of building, implementing and supporting major payment solutions. This experience has led Iliad to develop trusted, comprehensive and resilient test and certification solutions used for payment testing worldwide. For more information, visit www.iliad-solutions.com. To reach Anthony Walton via LinkedIn, see linkedin.com/in/anthony-walton-80b4779.
Whether you want to upgrade your POS offerings, find a payment gateway partner, bone up on fintech regs or PCI requirements, find an upcoming trade show, read about faster payments, or discover the latest innovations in merchant acquiring, The Green Sheet is the resource for you. Since 1983, we've helped empower and connect payments professionals, starting with the merchant level salespeople who bring tailored payment acceptance and digital commerce tools, along with a host of other business services to merchants across the globe. The Green Sheet Inc. is also a proud affiliate of Bankcard Life, a premier community that provides industry-leading training and resources for payment professionals.
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