Are you working in the fintech industry and have doubts about the quality strategy in developing your systems? This guide can help you understand how to face the challenge of fintech testing holistically and with best practices.
By Federico Toledo and Renzo Parente
As a result of the combination of the terms finance and technology, fintech refers to all those activities related to the use of technological advances and innovations to create, offer, and provide financial products and services.
It is a key industry for the accelerated digital transformation we are currently experiencing, so it is essential to have good practices and optimal software testing strategies.
From mobile applications to the management of personal finances and accounting or billing systems, to crowdfunding platforms, financial advisory services, online lending, digital payments, and more. The list of fintech-related activities is very diverse and growing not only as a greater variety of businesses emerge but also as innovations and tools expand digital horizons.
Looking for a Partner for fintech testing? Check out our end-to-end software testing services.
Why Is It Important to Focus on the Quality of Fintech Product Testing?
In the fast-paced world of financial technology, where innovation meets regulation, the quality of software testing isn’t just a checkbox—it’s a crucial safeguard. Fintech applications handle sensitive data, facilitate complex transactions, and must comply with rigorous regulatory standards.
A single glitch or vulnerability can lead to significant financial loss, legal repercussions, and, most critically, a loss of trust from customers who expect nothing less than absolute reliability.
Focusing on the quality of fintech product testing is vital because it enables robust security, operational resilience, and seamless user experiences. With the rapid evolution of digital finance, customers demand instantaneous, error-free transactions, and any lapse in quality can be costly.
High-quality testing processes help identify potential issues early, reduce time to market, and optimize performance under varying conditions. Moreover, comprehensive testing aligns the product with ever-changing regulatory landscapes, avoiding hefty fines and maintaining good standing with governing bodies.
Ultimately, quality in fintech product testing isn’t just about avoiding failures—it’s about fostering innovation while boosting reliability. It’s about building a foundation of trust in a digital-first world where the stakes are higher, and the margin for error is razor-thin.
When thinking about testing, due to the nature of financial services, there are some aspects to take into account.
Key Aspects to Consider in Fintech Testing
- Compliance with financial regulations and policies.
- Data integrity and customer privacy, particularly when handling sensitive financial data. Validating that your fintech applications meet these requirements involves comprehensive database testing.
- Integration with other systems.
- Handling the high volume of complex financial transactions.
- Market competition demands fast continuous delivery, security, and quality.
Although the fintech testing process has points in common with software testing processes in other types of businesses, data security and integrity are one of the most important.
Database testing includes validating data integrity, and verifying if all financial transactions are accurately processed and securely stored. This is particularly important in fintech, where errors in financial data can lead to significant losses or compliance issues. Data compliance testing helps align your systems with all relevant regulations, reducing the risk of penalties and enhancing trust with users.
We also highly recommend adding practices related to observability and monitoring in production since they can provide useful information in real time to act quickly in case of possible errors, fraud, or hacks. Each fintech business is different, so it is necessary to create a testing strategy that is closely aligned with the product.
Ultimately, the role of testing is key to helping maintain a stable, scalable, robust, secure, usable, and accessible product at every delivery.
Holistic Fintech App Testing Strategy
Being able to carry out releases continuously, quickly, and efficiently is a priority in fintech. This is not simply a value addition, but a necessity to stay in the market and remain competitive.
A frequently encountered scenario is the lack of time to perform the necessary testing methods. However, adopting an optimal testing strategy is fundamental for the creation of quality software, mitigating risks, and reducing costs.
Adopting agile methodologies and a DevOps culture is key when it comes to adapting to market changes, improving product quality, and at the same time, improving delivery speed.
Below, we share different practices to keep in mind when defining a testing strategy for fintech, and some considerations based on our empirical experience and learnings with these types of systems.
Best Practices for Defining a Fintech Testing Strategy
1. Test Automation
In a continuous integration process of software development, automation testing is paramount for fintech companies. They need to validate that there is sufficient coverage of the most important and business-critical functionalities, reduce feedback time, and minimize human errors to optimize delivery times and improve quality.
For this reason, when it comes to the fintech app testing strategy, we suggest focusing on automation testing as much as possible. It is important to think about a complete testing strategy before you start automating.
A good way forward is Cohn’s pyramid model, with more thorough testing at the unit level and the service layer. At these levels, tests run faster and are easier to maintain. In addition, Cohn’s model proposes to develop fewer tests at the user interface level, to cover more complete aspects of the system, considering that these tests are slower and more expensive to maintain.
We highly recommend reading this article: Automation Pyramid Model for Performance Testing Process
Each level of testing involves different challenges and there are numerous tools to carry out its design and execution. In fintech testing, there is usually a web application and a mobile application. Selecting the right tools for each level and for each interface to be automated is key to the success of the automation.
We recommend performing proofs of concept before moving forward with a tool or strategy, with tue aim of ensuring that you will be able to meet your goals.
In all cases, you can choose to code tests through the development of your own framework, based on open-source tools such as WebdriverIO, Appium, and RestAssure, among others. Or through tools known as low-code, no-code, codeless, or scriptless, which take advantage of advances in technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to improve the automated testing experience in the creation of test cases and their maintenance.
Interested in Test Automation? Click here to find out our tailored services and solutions.
2. Integration Testing
In most cases, a fintech system integrates with many other services, such as external providers for financial transactions, banks, payment gateways, or user account services.
Many times, we have encountered the difficulty that these external services do not provide us with testing or sandbox environments, or if they do, they may not be available at the time of running a test.
So, in order to move forward properly with our tests in an agile way, it is necessary to remove the dependency on the external platform. This is because, otherwise, we will get false positives or false negatives, which results in a lot of rework and no added value.
The solution for this situation is to define a good strategy based on mocks. The goal is to make our test environment robust, without making the test results depend on a test environment that we do not control. Therefore, it is necessary to focus on the integration of the tests with a mock server that simulates the same responses that we would get from the external service.
In the following image, you can see an example of the use of mocks in a fintech system to process payments. We tested it at the service layer level, and to avoid dependency on integration with banks, specific mocks were designed for that interaction.
At Abstracta, we recommend the use of Wiremock for dependencies with services over HTTP, such as an API Rest or SOAP, or Wiresham, an open-source product that we developed internally, for when the service is a protocol over TCP.
This strategy allows us to solve the testing of our code, of our changes. However, a very big challenge remains open, related to the changes made by the provider. Often, these changes are made without warning or are not replicated in the testing or sandbox environments they provide us with. Then, we do not detect them in time, nor do they arise with our tests with mocks.
This problem often leads to the combination of this strategy with production testing. It is also very important to have a fluid dialogue with suppliers, seeking together to generate a cycle of continuous improvement in these work processes with them.
3. Functional Testing and Testing in Production
Automation testing can help us get rid of repetitive and exhaustive tasks and perform tests faster, but it is not possible to achieve adequate and empathetic testing without the combination of functional testing (a.k.a. “manual testing”.).
The Pesticide Paradox
Certainly, the pesticide paradox applies to this issue. The insects that a pesticide cannot kill become stronger. An automated test will always test the same thing, it does not explore things that we didn’t ask to be tested.
It finds the biggest bugs on the first pass, but the ones that were not found get stronger. That’s why it’s good to have a combined approach: performing automatic testing but also ‘manual’ testing, with a share of curiosity.
Challenges and Business Expertise
Functional testing in fintech applications involves certain challenges, such as running regression testing, knowing the complexity of the business, often with the extra difficulty of having little documentation, knowing all the industry regulations of the countries in which it operates, and legal and tax aspects, among other factors.
Therefore, business expertise is key, as well as relying on similar systems to generate a base of ideas for testing based on previous experiences.
In the event that the teams do not have expertise in the business in question, it is crucial that they actively collaborate with the Product Owner and Business Analyst, to carry out more dynamic and accurate work.
Testing in Production and Risk Mitigation
A key practice in this type of system is testing in production. This is usually more challenging than in other types of systems, since, in fintech systems, probably every transaction, or every aspect we want to test, involves money movements.
How can we test this in production?
Some teams we’ve been working with have corporate credit cards to make purchases at specific locations. In production, you have a fake store (loaded in the system, which in reality does not exist), with very cheap products for example.
However, the transaction of the purchase is completely done, which ends up exercising the connection with the payment method or other components that you want to test. This greatly reduces the risk that we may not have been able to cover in the test environments.
Even so, it is very important to reduce as much as possible the number of production tests that can generate complications or that carry some risk and to have minimal tests that provide the greatest possible value to what we are trying to cover.
One way to achieve this is by using test cards in our testing environments, which should be connected to the sandbox services provided by the payment methods. Usually, payment methods provide this type of service. For this reason, if we use Google Pay, Apple Pay, Stripe, Paypal, Affirm, or others, we will be able to access such features provided by these payment methods.
For example, here you can see more about the testing mechanism offered by Stripe.
Monitoring and Rollback Mechanisms
So, if we decide to run tests in production, we must have the corresponding monitoring and rollback mechanisms to react quickly to any incident and minimize the loss of money.
We can monitor a range of metrics, including logged errors, counts of certain HTTP status codes, and total transaction amounts over a specified period. This allows us to compare statistics and identify trends.
Interested in enhancing your systems with Functional Testing? Click here to find out our tailored services and solutions.
4. Security
Fintech products and applications are constant targets of cyber attacks due to the large amount of sensitive data they hold and the type of transactions they handle. As a result, they carry a risk for users who use their technology. Likewise, the need to achieve speed to production in a secure manner is a major challenge for the software development lifecycle.
According to the findings of “The Global Risks Report 2024“, widespread cybercrime and cyber insecurity are in the TOP 10 of the most serious risks of the next decade.
As Rohit Ghai, CEO of RSA emphasized at the RSA 2022 Conference in San Francisco: “There will be new technologies, there will be new vulnerabilities. There will be new exploits and, of course, there will be malware that exploits those exploits.” In this context, focusing on the security of fintech applications is a priority.
Roger Abelenda, Chief Technology Officer of Abstracta, introduced: “When developing software, it is fundamental to take into consideration good practices to avoid attacks and known practices that make the software vulnerable. This requires the alignment and shared responsibility of all those involved in software development: developers, testers, product owners and project managers, sysadmins, etc.”
He continued: “Software testing is key to achieving additional control over the implemented software, either with exploratory tests, automated tests, or by using vulnerability scanning tools and/or static code analysis.”
To achieve this, Roger emphasized that it is a priority to have a protocol for potential foreseen attacks, including intervening actors, incident escalation, and timing. In addition, it is always necessary to have a backup plan for unforeseen situations, to be able to execute it quickly and avoid blind spots.
In turn, Matias Reina, CoCEO of Abstracta, remarked: “It is essential to bear in mind that all or most mobile applications use a backend of services. That backend must be tested following OWASP standards, in particular the ASVS, and it is not possible to perform an evaluation of the mobile part without considering the backend.”
You can find more information about OWASP and the methods that exist to complete validations according to its security standards in this article.
Looking for a security testing partner? Check out our customized services here.
5. Performance
Financial systems need to have high availability, i.e. be up and running a high percentage of the time. In addition, they generally need to be able to process a large amount of data quickly. If a system is down or slows to respond, it is very likely to generate financial losses for the business.
System Failures and Business Impact
Roger explained it this way: “System failures and inadequate performance in the face of high demand can have a major impact on retention and conversion rates, as well as the sustainability and scalability of businesses. Digital platforms are increasingly central to people’s lives, so software failure can generate huge losses for companies.”
“The more exposed, the more users and variables there are around an application, the more important it becomes to perform performance testing. Another naturally relevant factor is the criticality of the system: for example, a banking or healthcare system vs. a system for personal use for entertainment or with little impact on users,” he continued.
A typical metric measured in these types of systems is transactions per unit of time, such as transactions per second (TPS), to assess what load the system is capable of supporting with a given infrastructure. For example, with a single instance of the system, with a single server, how many TPS is it capable of handling with good response times? This can give a clear idea of how they scale, especially in terms of costs in systems hosted in the Cloud.
Importance of Early Performance Testing
Performance testing provides information on their behavior and performance in simulated environments and helps determine whether or not they are responding at the right times so that adjustments can be made. This process should start as early as possible to be most effective, since many times optimizations may involve changes in the software architecture. If this is detected late, it can be very costly.
Here it is highly important to speak about load testing. By simulating real-world scenarios, it allows businesses to anticipate and prepare for the intricate dynamics of user behavior.
Another essential aspect is the intersection of user behavior and business strategies. By effectively load testing, companies can not only gauge the technical performance but also discern patterns that can inform business decisions.
Once the system is already in production and running regularly, a complementary approach to performance monitoring is what we call “continuous performance testing“. At this point, instead of trying to verify the supported TPS and response times to a given load, the aim is to detect performance degradations as early as possible. These tests are added to the continuous integration pipeline.
What are the advantages of Continuous Performance Testing? Find out in this Roger’s article, with an interview with Andréi Guchin, Performance hub leader at Abstracta.
Click here to read a case study of one of our customers, Shutterfly.
Looking for a performance testing partner? Check out our customized services here
6. Usability and Accessibility
Another requirement to take into account in the quality process is the ease of use of our application, usability. It must be intuitive and fluid, in order to make it easy for the user to carry out the business transactions he/she needs.
Usability testing evaluates the degree to which the system can be used by specific users effectively, efficiently, and with satisfaction in a specific context of use. There are different techniques to analyze usability.
Evaluating Usability through Heuristics
To start with, we suggest performing an evaluation based on Nielsen heuristics, which is a usability inspection where it is judged whether each element of the user interface follows established usability principles.
To complement the findings that can be obtained from this assessment, we recommend conducting guided user testing. To do so, it is necessary to define the user persona of the fintech system in question, considering the country of origin, age, purchasing power, and more.
One strategy we have used on a few occasions is to combine our tests with crowd-testing services, in which it is possible to involve testers from specific regions, and with specific devices and means of payment.
Concerning accessibility, it is essential to comply with at least the minimum accessibility requirements established by the Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the international body that defines global web standards.
Improving people’s digital experience through the development of software without technological barriers, taking into account all existing conditions and disabilities, is vital to achieving the greatest possible digital autonomy and independence in each case, in pursuit of a more inclusive society, with a higher quality of life, more empathetic and respectful of differences.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), an estimated 1.3 billion people, or 16% of the world’s population, currently have “a significant disability.
Thus, digital accessibility is not only important because of its social relevance, but also because a proper implementation translates into the extension of the scope of services, in favor of the sustainability of organizations and companies. This last point implies that we would be expanding the size of the target market, thus expanding the business.
Don’t miss this article! Heuristics in API Testing for Quality Software
Guided User Testing and Accessibility Compliance
It is possible to measure accessibility with the help of the web accessibility standards created by the W3C, known as Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1). These guidelines are organized into 4 principles: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. These principles have 13 associated guidelines, which in turn have 78 associated success criteria, organized into three levels of conformance (A, AA, AAA). All these success criteria are verifiable through different tests.
We know that this is a huge task to add to those already planned, but we also understand that they are of utmost relevance in the construction of a society with equal opportunities, free of technological barriers. At Abstracta, we have more than 5 years of experience helping public agencies and private companies in this transition.
To begin with, our recommendation is to generate user interfaces that adapt to the WCAG standard at level AA. To evaluate this, both on the web and mobile, you can use tools such as axe, WAVE, ARCtoolkit, and others, but many of these tests must be performed manually. At Abstracta, we generate a verification checklist with indications on how to test each criterion, which facilitates and speeds up the task.
Looking for accessibility testing services? Check out our customized services here
7. Shift right, Monitoring and Observability
The practices mentioned in the previous points can help us minimize risks before the product or new features are available to users with as few bugs as possible. Even so, it is not possible to guarantee the absence of bugs before going into production.
Therefore, it is crucial to apply observability and shift right testing techniques, in order to be able to continue to obtain information about the quality of the product even after it goes into production.
By the book, testing indicates that we must perform tests in different stages and environments, to achieve a certain coverage before we release to production. In the context of fintech testing, this is not enough, so it is important to complement it with shift-right testing strategies. For this, it is necessary to work to ensure that our systems have good levels of observability, in order to be able to detect problems quickly and act accordingly.
Some key practices of this approach include canary release and A/B testing techniques, testing in production, and a monitoring system that provides a good level of observability.
Having adequate monitoring in production can help:
✔️Measure and process what is happening in our system in real-time.
✔️Observe the number of transactions in a given period or the volume of money that is circulating, to detect anomalies or out-of-normal ranges.
✔️Detect if any service is not responding as expected.
✔️Configure different parameters and rules, which can be adjusted according to the business, to send alerts, such as security problems.
Applying Shift-Right Testing Techniques
At Abstracta, we recommend the use of DataDog, a tool that allows users to combine all aspects of observability; to collate in an integrated way the information of metrics, traces, and logs in real-time; and to configure alerts based on rules, which can be defined based on standard metrics (such as CPU), or custom metrics, defined by us (such as the total amount of money transferred through a certain gateway).
In case you want to learn more about DataDog, Abstracta’s team can assist with training as well as with the installation and adoption of the tool.
Runtime error detection can be done with different tools, and it is even possible to integrate them into our monitors and alerts. There are tools such as Bugsnag, Crashlytics, Sentry, or LogSnag that help developers to identify, prioritize, and replicate errors coming from controlled and uncontrolled exceptions of their application.
These tools allow you to proactively see defects in the code, on which specific lines those errors occurred, and to which user session those errors belong. This helps you address problems before they escalate. Also, some can be integrated into Slack, Jira, or Trello, making it easy to log real-time detections.
Importance of Monitoring and Business Metrics
Let’s figure all this out with an example. Let’s imagine that, as part of our development, we have to release an integration with a new payment gateway. The team performed tests with mocks based on the documentation provided by the gateway vendor. The tests were performed in their sandbox environment, but it does not have the latest version of the gateway software, so we know there is a risk there.
When released to production, it is done with a canary release approach. This functionality is released only to a very low percentage of users (if possible, only to family and friends or beta testers). If all goes well, it is released to more users, and so on until everyone is reached.
It can also happen that bugs are discovered due to unforeseen edge situations, or due to differences in the software we integrate within its sandbox environment and the production environment. It is also possible that frauds are detected or that vulnerabilities are being exploited in this integration, since, for example, the new version of the software with which we integrate may have defects that affect our business.
This shows us that we not only have to monitor server metrics, HTTP 500 errors, or similar but also focus on business metrics. Does it make sense that the new integration behaves differently than expected? These practices help us to comprehensively evaluate all these issues.
Don’t miss this article! Shift-Left Testing & Shift-Right Testing, a Possible Strategy
Need help with observability? Check out our joint solutions with Datadog and contact us to discuss how we can help boost your business.
In a Nutshell
The fintech industry has the challenge of offering innovative products that comply with the regulations established in the country in which they operate, usability, accessibility, and security requirements. They must have the capacity to process a large amount of data in a fast, complete, and secure way.
Not having the right working and testing methodologies is a very big risk that can make us lose money, or our competitors do it better and faster and then we will lose the market.
On the whole, QA testing plays a vital role in maintaining the high standards required in the fintech industry, verifying that every system component functions correctly and securely. Its role in an agile and DevOps framework can help maintain a standard of quality at every stage of the fintech software development lifecycle, delivering value to meet business expectations at the speed required to stay competitive and beyond.
How We Can Help You
With over 16 years of experience and a global presence, Abstracta is a leading technology solutions company specializing in end-to-end software testing services and AI software development.
We believe that actively bonding ties propels us further and helps us enhance our clients’ software. That’s why we’ve forged robust partnerships with industry leaders like Microsoft, Datadog, Tricentis, and Perforce, empowering us to incorporate cutting-edge technologies.
We craft strategies meticulously tailored to your unique needs and goals, aligning with your core values and business priorities. Our holistic approach enables us to support you across the entire software development life cycle.
Embrace agility and cost-effectiveness. Visit our solutions page and contact us to discuss how we can help you grow your business.
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