Customers nowadays have little patience and can easily abandon underperforming banking apps. With 80% of millenials now depending on online and mobile banking services for their financial needs, any lag or glitch can significantly impact user satisfaction and, ultimately, brand loyalty.
An effective performance testing strategy is essential to improve the user experience and help businesses remain competitive. From understanding the unique challenges that the BFSI industries may encounter to key approaches for adopting performance testing, this guide will equip you with the insights needed to optimize your app’s performance and deliver exceptional digital experiences to customers.
What is Performance Testing in the BFSI Industry?
To identify how well banking and financial systems are equipped for the dynamic changes they face, performance testing is a robust method to evaluate the software’s ability to scale effectively. Performance testing for BFSI systems generally focuses on three key areas:
Digital Interface — Web and Mobile
Today’s digital technologies, ranging from mobile devices to wearables, play a crucial role in facilitating online banking, bill payments, cash withdrawals, transfers, and other transactions. Each financial process has unique software requirements and requires rigorous testing.
Legacy banking applications often lack the robustness to handle the maximum number of transactions performed simultaneously, such as bulk uploads, day-end settlements, and financial scheduling. Therefore, these systems need to be tested effectively to ensure they remain responsive and reliable under all conditions.
Ensuring a smooth and user-friendly experience for customers using apps is essential for efficient operations. As a result, these applications must undergo comprehensive performance testing to guarantee that online and branchless banking activities are executed seamlessly.
The golden rule of this testing method is to start as early as possible. It allows software teams to address critical issues from the outset and continue the testing process throughout the application’s development. Continuous performance testing throughout the app’s development is key, with a focus on resolving bottlenecks and performance issues to enhance the overall functionality of BFSI systems.
Different Performance Testing for Banking and Financial Systems
Performance testing for banking and financial systems is crucial to ensure these systems can handle high transaction volumes, maintain security, and deliver a seamless user experience.
1. Load Testing
Purpose: To assess how the system performs under expected user loads. It identifies performance bottlenecks and determines how many users the system can handle before performance degrades.
Application: Test how a banking app performs during peak usage hours, such as when many users log in simultaneously to check their accounts or perform transactions.
2. Stress Testing
Purpose: To measure the system’s performance under extreme conditions, helping identify the system’s breaking point and how it recovers from failure.
Application: Testing a financial system’s ability to handle unexpected surges in transactions during events like Black Friday or during a market crash.
3. Scalability Testing
Purpose: To determine the system’s capacity to scale up or down in response to an increase or decrease in the number of users or transactions. It assesses the system’s ability to maintain performance as it scales.
Application: Testing how a banking system adapts when the number of users doubles or triples, such as during the launch of a new product or service.
4. Volume Testing
Purpose: To test the system’s ability to handle large volumes of data. This helps ensure that the system can process significant amounts of data efficiently without affecting performance.
Application: Testing how well a banking system processes a large number of transactions, such as bulk uploads of financial records or large-scale data migration.
5. Endurance Testing (Soak Testing)
Purpose: To evaluate how the system performs over an extended period under a sustained load. This type of testing identifies potential memory leaks, degradation, and other issues that might arise from long-term usage.
Application: Running a Fintech app continuously for several days to ensure it remains stable and efficient during prolonged usage.
6. Spike Testing
Purpose: To evaluate how the system reacts to sudden, sharp increases in load, helping determine if the system can handle abrupt traffic spikes without crashing.
Application: The deadline for utility bills leads to a surge in the number of users accessing the banking application at certain times during the month.
How to Start Performance Testing for Financial Services Apps
The performance testing process for a banking and financial app involves several key steps to ensure the application can handle various loads and perform optimally under different conditions. Here’s a detailed breakdown of the process:
1. Requirement Gathering and Analysis
The performance testing process for a banking app starts with requirement analysis. In this phase, the testing team assesses the testing requirements and identifies which aspects can be evaluated.
These system specifications are categorized into functional and non-functional requirements. Testers must verify not only the functional business features but also key performance metrics like speed, reliability, availability, and security.
2. Test Case Development
The testing team must design, validate, and adjust specific scenarios according to the features and their requirements. Additionally, they need to generate testing data to use in these scenarios for scripting, such as banking transactions, back-end schedulers, or integrations with core banking systems.
3. Testing Environment Configuration
The test environment includes the hardware and software configurations used during the testing process. Ideally, it should replicate the conditions the end-user would encounter in their workspace. In the BFSI industry, banks and financial institutions often provide an internal environment to simulate load and assess real-time core banking issues, while also allowing load testing over the Internet to evaluate potential problems faced by end customers.
4. Executions
In this phase, the QA team performs tests based on the test strategy approved by the bank’s team to identify real-time issues experienced by customers and internal staff. Following the outlined strategy, the execution begins to assess the application’s threshold and the resilience of its infrastructure. This process helps the team understand and observe performance issues within the financial system.
5. Analyze Results, Report, and Retest
Finally, the testing team gathers to review, share insights, and evaluate test documents to refine the strategies. Based on the independent analysis, they reprioritize and rerun any necessary tests. Once all performance metrics are within acceptable limits, no thresholds are exceeded, and the desired results are achieved, the testing process for that scenario is considered complete.
Key Challenges of Performance Testing BFSI Companies May Face
- Handling large volumes of data: banks and financial institutions often face significant challenges in managing large datasets and securely handling sensitive information. They need efficient testing platforms that ensure data security while effectively analyzing the data to uncover critical performance issues and enhance overall application performance.
- Gaining detailed performance insights: Many testing platforms struggle to accurately measure key performance metrics, detect performance issues, and provide recommendations for improvement. In many cases, BFSI software testing solutions lack comprehensive coverage and fail to offer a unified platform for performing all necessary testing operations.
- Ineffective analysis of performance test results: The data analysis must provide actionable insights to address performance bottlenecks. Organizations need strong capabilities to gather, interpret, and analyze data, measure performance metrics, and turn these insights into effective solutions.
Overcome the Performance Testing Obstacles With KMS Solutions!
Every financial institution has its own unique set of challenges and requirements. Recognizing this, we provide customized solutions with performance testing metrics specifically designed to meet your needs. Whether you’re launching a new online banking platform, upgrading your insurance claims processing system, or implementing a new trading platform, our expertise is at your service. Our services include:
- Identifying bottlenecks and performance slowdowns: Our testing team runs stress tests, load tests, and performance profiling to detect bottlenecks— specific points where the system experiences delays or inefficiencies.
- Assessing System Scalability with Increased Workload or Traffic: We simulate various levels of user load and transaction volumes to evaluate how well your system scales. We test the application’s performance under increasing stress to determine how it handles higher traffic or data loads.
- Assisting with capacity planning by providing data on system behavior under various loads: We provide valuable data on how your system behaves under different load conditions to assist with capacity planning. This involves measuring system performance and resource utilization during various testing scenarios.
- Benchmarking system performance against predefined criteria or industry standards: We assess metrics such as response times, throughput, error rates, and resource utilization. We ensure the BFSI applications exceed performance expectations and stay competitive in the market.
