The use of digital banking has seen dramatic increases over the past several years while, at the same time, the number of traditional, brick-and-mortar banks have decreased (approximately 2,500 bank branches closed in 2023 in the United States alone). A banking app with a seamless user experience that offers no consumer frustrations has never been more important.
For a bank or financial institution to feel confident in the performance of their app, incorporating banking application testing must be at the top of the list of priorities. An app that is cumbersome to use, slow to load, or frequently glitchy is the fastest way to lose a customer — especially when dealing with sensitive financial information.
Banking applications are often comprised of complex functionality and a wide range of features. Combine that with sensitive data like financial records, and a lack of banking application testing can lead to calamitous events like data breaches, bank fraud, and lost money.
In this blog, we will discuss what banking application testing is, how to incorporate banking application testing into your work, types of testing effective for banking apps, and how BlazeMeter provides the best banking application testing on the market.
What is Banking Application Testing?
Banking application testing is a software testing method that analyzes and measures a banking application’s performance, functionality, and — most importantly — security. This enables testing teams to identify any potential performance and security issues for mobile banking apps. It ensures the banking app is operating as securely and smoothly as required.
Banking application testing is important because banking apps contain numerous features and complexities. Testing teams must ensure the seamless use of features like allowing safe transactions, keeping track of day-to-day transactions, and leveraging geolocation for finding ATMs and bank branches — just to name a few.
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Establishing a Comprehensive Banking Application Testing Setup
Maybe you are new to the banking app testing arena, or maybe you are currently conducting banking application testing but feel that it could be going better. Below is an overview of how to incorporate banking app testing into your overall testing strategy from beginning to end.
Determine Requirements
Requirements for a banking application must be gathered both from stakeholder and end-user perspectives. Ask yourself these questions:
- What do we want this app to do?
- How can we help the consumer?
Categorize requirements for features like money transfers, loans, bill payments, and mortgages into their own respective buckets to help focus on each properly.
Establish Business Case
After you have determined the requirements for the app and categorized them accordingly, it is time to review them against business cases. That means comparing functional specifications and requirements against business scenarios to validate and ensure that the banking app testing can operate within existing workflows. This review is done at a high level between all parties involved — QA engineers, development leads, and business analysts. Once all the requirements are verified and confirmed, it is time to move to the next step.
Build & Execute Tests
Here is where the testing team prepares the test cases based on perceived negative and positive expected outcomes. QA engineers will then review these test cases and, once the green light is given, it is time to execute the tests. These tests can be executed either manually or automated depending on the team’s resources and capabilities.
Functional Testing
Functional testing ensures the features of the banking app are working as desired — without bugs or glitches. Things to look out for at this stage are making sure all links on the page are clickable, the scrolling function works smoothly, empty or invalid fields show error messages, fields have a character limit (this is important for bank account numbers), and the buttons are working properly.
Database Testing
Database testing ensures all functionality pertaining to data is operating as required. This means determining if the app can store and retrieve data without data loss, as well as ensuring completed transactions are committed to the database.
Security Testing
When it comes to banking apps, data and information security is of the utmost importance. This stage of the banking app testing workflow ensures that the app has no security flaws. This phase will consist of confirming the app is in accordance with security standards and regulations and extra focus should be placed on protecting sensitive user data. Negative and positive testing scenarios should be implemented to fully understand the ramifications of a potential hacker breaking into the system. Additionally, two-factor validation or biometric authentication could (and should) be implemented.
User Acceptance Testing
This is the final stage of banking application testing; it is what everything has led to. A satisfied user is the objective here — the development team needs to feel confident upon the app’s release. One of the best ways to do that is to get the app in the hands of users via a focus group. A focus group will be comprised of differing devices, operating systems, and network connections. So, testing against multiple combinations of those factors is required. It can be complex — especially with the added layer of security that goes with banking apps — but it is vital for perfecting an app that deals with sensitive information and money.
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Banking Application Testing With BlazeMeter
BlazeMeter understands both the importance and sensitive nature of banking application testing better than anyone. That is why our testing capabilities for digital banking apps are so robust — we have invested countless resources into make them the best they can be.
With BlazeMeter, users can ensure their digital banking app can seamlessly authenticate users with its respective digital bank server, deposit and withdraw from a checking or savings account, register new users with the bank server, and successfully logout users.
And how do we do that? By integrating with Perfecto’s unrivaled mobile testing capabilities. For banking apps in particular, BlazeMeter users can incorporate Perfecto into performance tests for:
Ensuring application performs correctly based on GPS & network.
Application testing using biometric authentication for secure login.
Using image injection functionality for validating functions like taking pictures of checks for mobile deposit.
That is in addition to BlazeMeter’s service virtualization (otherwise known as mock services) that can be used for simulating third-party applications that are not readily available — whether due to cost or licensing issues. Service virtualization bridges the gap for services that may not yet be written by allowing testing to continue.
You can integrate every testing component you could possibly need to ensure a flawless user experience as well as bulletproof data security — all in one testing location.
See for yourself how integrating BlazeMeter and Perfecto into one unified testing experience radically boosts your testing and ensures a robust, secure banking app. Request a custom demo of the two platforms in action today!
Bottom Line
The proliferation of web and mobile banking apps is not slowing down any time soon. Brick-and-mortar bank branches are closing in favor of the digital banking experience. That is why the digital banking experience must be just as — if not more — smooth as the in-person experience was. Users will turn their backs on anything less.
That is why banking application testing is so important. A seamless and reliably secure banking app will speak volumes about the organization. Think of the alternative: if a bank’s app experiences a data breach, any current or potential customer may very well avoid it like the plague.
BlazeMeter offers unparalleled banking application testing. Our service virtualization, load testing, and negative testing capabilities combined with the power of Perfecto’s mobile app testing platform translates to a reliably secure banking app.