Mobile Testing in Banking Domain

Banking is one of the industries that the mobile revolution has reshaped. Mobile banking is crucial for its convenience and accessibility, providing customers instant access to their accounts anytime, anywhere. It enhances efficiency, saves time, and offers personalized services, ultimately improving customer satisfaction. Mobile banking promotes financial inclusion and ensures secure transactions through robust security measures. It also brings up considerable security and other challenges, as mobile banking requires a lot of private information to be accessible over the Internet. 

The challenges make it imperative that the banking applications be tested to the highest quality standards. I will share my experience testing mobile applications in the banking sector in this article.

Importance of Technology in Banking and Mobile Apps

Have you ever considered the critical role tech plays in banking? Simple things like the following technology have allowed all banking customers to access many services in the comfort of one’s own homes. It’s essential in today’s world a user needs to have access to their banks 24/7 to do trivial things such as

• Bill Payments
• Money Transfers
• Loan and mortgage payments
• Contactless payments

These transactions are enabled through a mobile application that is a portal to sensitive information, and these applications must be tested to the highest possible standards.

Future of Tech and Banking

As tech grows, the future of banking is looking bright. There are many trends in the banking world, such as Application programming interface (API) to make proprietary data available to anyone needing access. Many Fintech are using API technology to enable their businesses to function, and the success in this area is encouraging more Fintech to develop their APIs. AI is another big topic, and Banks are using this to make a customer’s identification and authentication process smoother while using employees through chatbots or even voice assistants.

Additionally, a 2020 Insider Intelligence survey 

• 66% of Banking Executives believe new technologies like blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT) will significantly impact banking by 2025. 

• Banks are exploring blockchain technology in hopes of streamlining processes and cutting costs.
• Consumers can already see AI being used by most banks through chatbots in the front office. 
• Banks are using AI to smooth customer identification and authentication while mimicking live employees through chatbots and voice assistants.

As technology advances and evolves, it brings many new and complex capabilities. However, this progress also presents a significant challenge when testing these technologies accurately. One particular area that poses difficulties is the emulation of human actions.

Comprehensive testing is necessary to identify any potential vulnerabilities or flaws. During testing, mimicking human actions and responses becomes essential when testing technologies that interact with humans, such as artificial intelligence (AI) systems, autonomous vehicles, or robotic assistants.

Testing Mobile Banking Applications and Websites

Many tools are available today to help test mobile applications and websites even. This type of testing is also known as mobile testing, cross-browser, and cross-platform testing. BrowserStack is one of the well-known tools for this. 

To have successful mobile and web testing strategy make sure to include the following:

• Select various types of mobile devices(different brands, Android, iOS) and platforms such as iPads, Laptops, and Desktops to test on. 
• Decide on browsers like the latest Google Chrome, slightly older Google Chrome, and an older version to see where the app breaks.
• Test on different versions of operating systems to see which OS the web and mobile are 100% not compatible with. 
• Try to throttle mobile and other platforms to see where the application works best with 5G, 4G, EDGE…
• Remember to focus also on accessibility so that the app is socially apt on mobile and the web for a % of users.

Remember, if the mobile and web testing for banking applications are not done thoroughly, it can lead to negative publicity, loss of money, and reputation. It often results in legal issues and irreparable brand image damage. When I consulted

When I consulted as a senior tester at a leading Bank in the UK, my responsibilities included executing end-to-end tests, regression testing, accessibility testing, and mobile testing before we release the code. I learned two important things. 

Significance of Non-functional Testing

I understood the significance of non-functional tests only five years into my role. As someone who had never worked on non-functional tests, I understood the product’s offerings and the necessary testing requirements for ensuring quality. I devised a comprehensive strategy to drive the testing process for the Open Banking app, considering both the mobile and web perspectives.

The devised strategy encompassed vital areas that needed to be addressed regarding mobile testing. It included the selection of mobile devices, app versions, browsers, and their respective versions. The operating systems and their versions were also significant components of the test strategy. Recognizing the importance of thorough testing, I realized that relying on more than just one version of a web browser would provide more value. Identifying potential breakpoints and anomalies was crucial, akin to Chaos testing.

To address this, I decided to incorporate at least three versions of web browsers in the testing process. This approach allowed us to ensure compatibility and support for the latest, slightly older, and older versions of browsers. Considering that our customers may be using a variety of browser versions, supporting as many as possible was imperative for delivering a seamless experience.

Importance of Cloud Testing

In addition to testing on different versions of the browsers, it is vital to test it on as many devices as possible, and to own and keep up to date with the latest devices can be a difficult task, and this is where a cloud testing product like BrowserStack can save the day and make your life a lot easier.   

BrowserStack played a vital role in implementing the strategy by providing us with different versions of browsers, Mobile Operating systems, and various Real devices, including mobile phones, tablets, and laptops from multiple brands.

How to Onboard Teams into Mobile Testing

Even though everyone understands how crucial mobile testing is, it isn’t easy to onboard everyone to start testing on mobile devices, and the best way to onboard the team into Mobile testing is by following the following steps:

1. Research Mobile testing and educate your teams
2. Get buy-in from your stakeholders and understand how it fits with the company’s core values, the budget in place, and how we can showcase its benefits. Sometimes getting buy-in can result in tricky conversations. However, it is all about how and what information you present. So be ready with some stats and showcase what could happen if proper testing still needs to be implemented.
3. Decide if you want to test Mobile web/hybrid native/pure native or everything.
4. Research on a couple of tools, such as BrowserStack
5. Ask the tooling company to provide Demo and some Q&A sessions to showcase what they can support the team with and what they can’t support. 
6. Build a strategy, even if it’s a draft to see what areas we can cover or have a phased approach, include all the right stakeholders, and use the strategy as a guide.
7. Once the decision is made by the team and company wise and budgets are approved, the tool can be integrated. 
8. Teams should get training for the tool. 
9. Once the tool is embedded in the team(s), make sure to have some test plans so teams can test accordingly.
10. Start with simple tests and grow the test stack.

When to Start Mobile Testing

To start with mobile testing, you need to have prior knowledge of software testing and some ideas about automation tools. It would be a great advantage if you have worked on any test automation tool. It is also essential to understand how the mobile works and its key requirements.

Understand what type of mobile testing you want to do, as well as there are some options. Mobile web applications, for instance, are when the website opens on a device (smartphone or tablet) with the help of a mobile browser. A native app is developed specifically for one platform (Android, iOS, Tizen, Windows 10 M0bile, BlackBerry). Finally, the Hybrid app mixes the  Native App and Mobile Web App. It can be defined as mobile website content exposition in the application format.

No app should go live before it’s been mobile tested if your application is for mobile users. When you know the application is built for mobile devices, have a mobile testing strategy in place.

Options for your strategy:

How sensitive/privacy concerned the App testing should be in banking vs other sectors

Banks and financial institutions need to ensure all their applications are secure and no data is compromised. As we all know, data is a sensitive matter, whether that’s data of customers and financial issues from a bank or just your social media data. Hence, the GDPR rules are in place and should be followed very thoroughly to avoid legal impediments. Similarly, Cyber security is a matter of concern too. It is vital to have Pentesting or some ethical hacking tests done to protect the customers and the bank itself.

A bank’s model/strategy is much more complex than other industries. Therefore we need to ensure the applications are built correctly and securely as they all get audited too. 

BrowserStack has a great guide to testing banking apps and ensuring nothing is compromised. I have used Browserstack at a bank, which has provided the confidence a team needs to release an app.

More than 60% of global financial institutions with at least $5 billion in assets were hit by a variety of cyberattacks over the past year.

Mobile and web testing should be part of your testing strategy when you are aware that the product you are building will be customer-facing. Remember to understand what needs to be tested and how it can be tested in the right manner. Especially with financial institutions, one should know the ins and outs of the application before committing to mobile testing, as any data lost or hacked can cause a major mishap. Banking is a complex world, and their software is not a simple app. Make sure to involve the right stakeholders from the very start and keep enhancing your testing stack with tools like BrowserStack. Lastly, if we want to go live, it is better to have a solution in place to help improve complex systems, streamline the user experience, protect the users and the data as well as improve the performance of an application.