Just a couple of decades ago, Banking sector was highly reliant on paper to document and record. When computers became mainstream, they switched to spreadsheets. Similarly, it’s now virtually impossible to find a business that doesn’t employ some sort of cloud-based SaaS product to keep track of their records (or any other business process). According to Gartner, digital business transformation stands for a “process of exploiting digital technologies to create a robust new digital business model.”

As follows from this digital transformation definition, the process is far more complex and important than simply converting your information and processes from an analogue format to a digital one and moving it to the cloud.

In a nutshell, Digital Transformation requires an organization to undergo Technological as well as Organizational Changes to deliver the best value and customer experiences. This means rethinking everything you do, both internally and externally, by adopting new technologies to provide a better customer experience as well as streamlining your internal performance. These are the top 5 ways in which you can avoid failure and have a successful digital transformation in the banking –

1.       Business Modernization

Business modernization represents one of the most crucial and complex digital transformation processes. Main component of business modernization involves switching from on-premises legacy systems to the modern cloud-based or on-premises solution. Many banks are trapped with old and legacy systems that pose many difficulties in the transformation. These legacy systems cannot cope up with the customer’s constant demand for convenience, operational scalability, and new upgraded features. These are just some of the current realities of banking applications. Bank Modernization can be done in following aspects –

• Large scale of integration: Applications in BFSI integrate with numerous other applications like bill pay, trading accounts and complex business workflows to make a seamless uninterrupted flow
• Multi-tier functionality to support thousands of concurrent users sessions
• Real-time and batch processing
• High rate of transactions per seconds
• Security
• High need for reporting to keep track of transaction data
• Strong auditing to troubleshoot customer issues

2.       Consolidation of applications

The first step in bank’s digital rehaul should be to review the set of applications that were not developed or purchased with a consistent tech goal but were built to fulfil some isolated requirements. For instance, to execute a simple query like finding customer balance, several different functions were written.

Consolidation of applications helps reduce the time to market for new features. It will also reduce the cost of running multiple tool stacks and applications for day-to-day operations. Remove or replace those applications which increases overhead costs and maintenance rather than solving any kinds of problems. For example, HP QC used for test management can be replaced with modern new tools that are cost efficient and more aligned towards achieved digital transformation goal.

3.       Loosely coupled architecture – required for digital transformation

Banking organizations have gone through multiple phases of digitalization in last 50 years. The monolithic legacy applications developed on mainframe technologies are still running the core banking business functions. The current wave of digital transformation is driven by open architecture applications that support multiple integrations.  The loosely couple architecture makes it possible to create high-quality software at speed. It increases resiliency, fault tolerance, and enables systems that scale easily when the user-base in digital channels increases.

Few highlights of applications built with such architecture are –

• They are flexible and scalable. Hence integration with other systems becomes easy and seamless.
• Although different tools are designed to perform different designated functions, because of such architecture they can be integrated with a centralized tool which can then become single source of truth for taking all the critical decisions. QMetry has tools that can help with testing of such diverse applications. QMetry Test Management works as a centralized repository for all the testing activities – manual as well as automation, across different applications. Another tools – QMetry Automation Studio helps automate the newly build applications through digital transformation.
• The whole process from start to release can be automated. Meaning such modern tools can plugged and played in the automated pipeline easily which then ensures faster releases.

4.       Increase in use of test automation

Test Automation is what drives digital transformation – supporting quality delivery at speed and reducing risks. Test Automation is the pillar of successful digital transformation in banking enabling productivity and improving go-to-market times. Using automation, you can build better apps with lesser effort, in a shorter time. You can identify bugs earlier, run tests more often and improve your coverage.

With advances in technology and the adoption of test engineering approaches like Behavior-Driven Development and Test-Driven Development reduces time and manual testing efforts. It also allows teams to trace requirements to test cases and actual tests. The automatic and repeatable test cases for the application in a regression test suite can facilitate rapid and frequent deployment of software in production.

5.       Continuous integration and Continuous Deployment

Releasing high-quality, frequent updates and ensuring a seamless user experience across channels requires a continuous delivery pipeline. This is done by automating the pipeline using automated scans that identify potential security issues or performance bottlenecks. By integrating these scans with automated test cases, you build software that is always release-ready.

An automated and accelerated release process leads to on-time and frequent product releases. This eliminates the possibility of system down-time and automates the production release process with little or no effort from development teams. But how can banks use their pre-existing systems to achieve automation, CI/CD and faster go-to-market? The answer is: by implementing a platform that allows them to implement multiple integrations and increase their productivity.

Conclusion

Typically, banks score well on the digital transformation maturity scale for some of the more challenging aspects such as culture, agility, architecture readiness and technical best practices. Operational stability is also an important factor for banks to consider before they adopt any new approaches. Banks that have succeeded in adopting continuous delivery and business modernization have used automated builds and tests results to drive meaningful insights into the status of their applications. By getting software quality status early and often, they can ensure the overall health and reliability of their systems, performing at the optimum level to deliver the best customer experiences. The areas in which banks need to focus more are to do with the adoption of the right tools, technology & processes.

How QMetry works with the banking sector to resolve its unique quality challenges?

• Achieve high level of transparency by maintaining all testing artefacts on single platform
• Ensure compliance through approval mechanism
• Increased visibility into product readiness
• High performance along with secured and stable solution
• Multiple, bi-directional integrations with DevOps tools like Jira or Jenkins
• Elimination of redundant tasks to decrease backlog