Performance testing is the backbone of success. If an organization is looking for high customer engagement, ROI, and an enhanced brand image, the importance of bank testing increases manifold. The Consumer Survey Banking Methods 2024 clearly states that 64% of Gen-Z and 68% of millennials prefer banking mobile apps for all their transactions.
Considering the sensitive nature of information they hold, and the risks the industry has to cater to, financial application testing for performance is mandatory.
While the performance is generally optimal under normal load conditions, as long as its apps’ functional testing has been rigorous, peak usage time puts its performance to the test. This post will examine why performance testing is critical, specifically for financial application testing. Let’s dig in.
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Overview of Banking Digital Landscape
Performance testing opens horizons for app growth by providing a crystal ball view of what’s going on as far as performance parameters are concerned. Before we discuss the importance of testing banking apps, it’s crucial to get a deeper grasp of the digital landscape of the banking sector.
Banks are under immense pressure to deliver reliable, secure commands, seamless services with the surge in their option of fintech. In an environment as dynamic as today’s, banks have to prioritize innovation and operational excellence by enabling their systems to provide various real-time services and handle off-the-charts transaction volumes, all while staying in compliance with regulations.
Read More: Top Performance Testing Tools
Since even the most minor performance issues can cause heavy losses and intense customer dissatisfaction, the banking sector is all the more concerned about providing a superior UX.
Common Apps that Cause Performance Issues in the Finance and Banking Sector
The BFSI sector deals with many entities and apps that could cause glitches or performance issues. Some of the most common apps that cause performance issues are:
- Mobile banking apps struggle with transaction processing issues, peak crashes, and slow load times.
- Personal finance apps are causing processing errors and delays fetching data from bank servers.
- Trading platforms often cause data synchronization problems, slow response times, or latency problems, especially when the market is volatile.
- Fraud detection apps can sometimes make blunders when encountering data inaccuracies or slow processing, preventing or delaying fraudulent activity detection.
- Digital wallet apps often have difficulties or delays updating the bank balance in real time, which can be incredibly frustrating.
Importance of Financial Application Testing For Performance
The finance industry is one of the significant sectors facing massive pressure to reinvent its operations. Technology has taken the driver’s seat in instigating change at a global scale in banking.
Whether banking or insurance, all financial services have become more software-driven, making performance testing critical to maintaining reliability, security, and user satisfaction. This section will discuss the importance of financial application testing for performance.
Recognizing Performance Bottlenecks
Specifically, load testing effectively identifies system limitations and performance bottlenecks in banking applications. While testing a banking app, it uncovers points of failure, resource constraints, and slow response times by simulating scenarios with high traffic conditions, so that banking systems are more equipped to manage peak loads without compromising UX or performance.
Improving Performance For Better Customer Trust
It’s no secret that poor application performance is the number one factor that erodes customer trust. Customers rely on financial institutions and banks for the privacy and safety of their most sensitive information, investment data, and monetary assets. Therefore, any significant glitch or shutdown during a transaction or any online finance-related process inevitably causes customer churn.
Ensuring Regulatory Compliance
Since every financial institution is subject to strict regulations about system availability, data integrity, and transaction processing times, performance testing helps validate their systems and checks whether they’re able to meet these requirements despite high stress conditions. Performance testing also helps mitigate compliance violations and the risk of associated penalties.
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
By simulating extreme scenarios, banks can assess system behavior under unprecedented circumstances and develop contingency plans. This process includes testing and recovery procedures, and failover mechanisms to ensure the availability of critical banking services at all times.
Cost Efficiency
Performance problems can impact UX, which can negatively affect revenue. For instance, if a system uses every single server resource while processing transactions quickly, it risks failure during high user demand. As a result, the number of crashes is higher, along with potential downtime and maintenance costs.
Legacy banking systems struggle with various performance limitations, compromising their reliability and responsiveness for accelerated transaction processing. But once banking organizations start implementing performance testing, it helps validate system scalability, prevent failures, and optimize response times even during peak demand.
Most Important Types of Performance Testing for Testing Bank Apps
The digital banking world can often be complex since there’s extreme importance on efficiency, reliability, and security. Therefore, it calls for a comprehensive approach towards conducting performance testing. Let’s look at the types of performance testing for testing bank apps, with each having a specific purpose towards contributing to the scalability and robustness of financial systems.
Endurance Testing or Soak Testing
Since banking applications usually operate 24/7, testing a bank app for endurance helps determine the system’s performance under sustained load over an extended time frame. Banking customers aren’t generally very tolerant of frequent maintenance windows or restarts.
Recovery Testing
In case a banking app crashes, a quick recovery is more essential than in any other industry. Recovery testing simulates different failure scenarios and helps banks develop smart disaster recovery plans.
How to Conduct Performance Testing for Banking Apps
Getting started with bank testing for performance issues requires a crystal clear testing strategy and consistent implementation. While generally, it follows a procedure similar to any agile app, you might need to customize the steps depending on the banking app’s features, business objectives, and scale.
Let’s examine the different phases of conducting performance testing for banking apps.
1. Requirement Gathering and Analysis
Requirement gathering and analysis is the first step towards financial application testing, where the QA team evaluates testing requirements and outline specifications for testing, both functional and non-functional. To make the most of every testing session, it’s best to have a well-versed industry-specific UX specialist with extensive domain knowledge of the banking and finance sector.
2. Development Of Test Cases
The test case development stage involves creating test cases along with their corresponding scripts. QA teams create, verify, and remake specific test cases based on given requirements and features, preferably separating each case by functionality modules to leave no aspect uncovered.
3. Test Environment Setup
The QA testing team needs to know the specifics of the hardware, software, and architectural specifications of the test environment before proceeding with the setup. Ideally, it’s an imitation of the end user environment that checks its readiness for the real world.
4. Test Execution and Analytics
Here QA teams carry out the performance testing process in strict adherence with the test cases and test plans they created followed by requirements evaluations. After that, they can report errors to the developers followed by exchanging information, collaborating, and analyzing the test documents to create a report.
5. Reporting and Retesting
On the basis of their findings, testers reprioritize any remaining tests and execute them again as per requirement. Once every single metric value is in acceptable limits, the team has all desired findings without violating any thresholds, we can consider the testing process in that particular scenario complete.
How Pcloudy Has Been a Game Changer for Performance Testing in BFSI
Pcloudy offers UI performance testing by monitoring key metrics such as the Frame Deadline Missed, Frame Render Time, and Page Content Score. It also uses critical health metrics such as Battery Energy Drain, CPU & Memory Usage, and Device Stability To check device performance and evaluates DNS Lookups, Connection Multiplexing, TCP/TLS Handshake Times, and Latency to ensure optimal Network and API performance.
All in all, it offers an end-to-end experience in performance testing for the banking sector.
Key Features:
- Uses audio Qoe and perceptual video to optimize streaming performance.
- Ensures performance consistency by evaluating DNS Lookups, Connection Multiplexing, TCP/TLS Handshake Times, and Latency.
- Resolves inefficient conditions and high failure rates.
- Tracks Battery Energy Drain, CPU & Memory Usage, and Device Stability to facilitate efficient running of apps across different devices which also makes it the best load testing tool.
- Delivers seamless app interactions by catering to metrics such as Frame Deadline Missed, Frame Render Time, and Page Content Score.
Some of its successful case studies include:
- Helping a European Bank firm cut their app testing costs by a whopping 20x.
- Enabled a Singapore-based banking client to save on 3x returns by offering 5x test coverage.
- Accelerated application adoption for an American Healthcare insurance company.
Case Studies: Know how Pcloudy helped organizations gain
advantage in app testing
Conclusion
Performance testing is a cornerstone in an increasingly digitized global landscape and a bare minimum technical necessity for the banking sector. Ever since 2020, we have seen a significant surge in the integration of financial services into our day-to-day lives, which explains the increase in demand for secure, responsive, and seamless online experiences.
Suppose organizations are willing to rigorously test BFSI app performance under peak loads, network variability, and high traffic conditions.
In that case, they’ll strengthen customer trust with consistent delivery and error-free experiences by safeguarding the app’s reliability.
If you’re a banking organization looking forward to the most comprehensive performance testing, sign up for a 30-day free trial of Pcloudy today!
FAQs
How does performance testing affect banking regulatory compliance?
Performance testing has a positive impact on regulatory compliance in the banking sector. It helps meet the required industry standards for security and speed of data processing, which often dominate regulatory requirements.
How does poor app performance impact user retention and trust in banking apps?
Poor app performance indicators, such as unexpected crashes, failed transactions, and slow load times, can erode customer trust, decreasing user retention and high abandonment rates.
What are the top risks that come with neglecting banking app performance testing?
Neglecting financial application testing, especially during app updates, can cause discrepancies with adding new features and degrade application performance by causing connectivity problems, crashes, and slower response times.
How do mobile apps in the banking sector cater to performance in areas with compromised internet connectivity?
Performance testing of banking apps calls for simulating low-bandwidth environments to ensure smooth functioning of these apps under less-than-ideal connectivity and network conditions and prevent transactional delays or crashes.
