Due to COVID-19, there have been gradual changes in the BFSI (Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance) sector’s digital transformation methods. As it drove users to switch from ATMs and physical branches to mobile banking, it also generated opportunities and brought about a revolution in the sector. Consumers engage with their banks, and according to a Boston Consulting Group (BCG) survey, 24% of customers expect to use branches less or quit going altogether.

Let’s talk about the challenges affecting the BFSI sector in this regard and examine how digital transformation, which includes intelligent automation, is resolving these problems.

Digital Transformation Challenges in Financial Sector

Digital transformation entails several dangers, but is it worth the risk? Let’s have a look at the many difficulties that might constitute a major bottleneck for BFSI businesses.

• Dispersed knowledge: It is critical to have centralized information, which many FIs lack in order to have a solid systemized platform for gathering data and tracking performance. Having a good platform that provides employees with access to information when they need it, as having knowledge when needed will guarantee employees operate autonomously without interfering with the organization’s job.
• Bank’s collaboration with IT firms: It is vital for banks to collaborate with IT firms rather than view them as rivals since hiring services is less expensive and more convenient than building your own IT staff and working with them. Banks may get an advantage over their competitors by engaging in the services of an IT business and having the essential assistance available anytime it is needed.
• Resistance to change: It is difficult to persuade employees to modify their daily routines since they have gotten accustomed to them over time. However, you might be able to get over their resistance to change by attending to their financial worries, preserving their independence at work, and other issues. To safeguard the banks’ or financial institutions’ workflow, the entire change must be carried out methodically.
• Maintaining security: Assuring the security of their consumers’ data is one of the trickiest hurdles in the banking sector’s digital transition. The First American Financial Corp Data Breach in May 2019 exposed 885 million credit card applications. Therefore, installing a firewall alone is no longer sufficient to maintain data security. But would it be able to maintain the safety and security of every user’s account when millions of users rely on digital tools for daily cash flow?

Intelligent Automation in BFSI For Relaxed Workflow 

With conventional ways lasting for a long time, digital technology has led the road to making life easier. It is now assisting new companies and enterprises in working more efficiently and quickly with banks and FIs (Financial Institutions). Customers may now access their financial information, such as income statements and credit ratings, with a single click on their smartphones and other mobile devices. 

With the deployment of technology such as automation, artificial intelligence (AI), big data, machine learning (ML), and so on, fintech businesses have effortlessly embraced the potential of digital transformation. It has given rise to a new viewpoint on how banking operations should be carried out. Many time-consuming operations, such as contactless payments and mortgage applications, have been made much faster with the help of these companies. 

With innovations accelerating, financial institutions must look to invest in new technologies and stay up to speed on all the newest breakthroughs that will enhance the road to digital transformation. 

Deep diving into the current trend, big data, automation, and RPA when combined with artificial intelligence delivers a major pump to the BFSI industry. The rise of AI-powered chatbots over the past decade has produced beneficial automation processes that have made it possible to automate the classification, aggregation, and response to frequent internal and external requests. Employees from various fields, such as banking, finance, or insurance, may thereby refocus their attention on jobs that are more important and distinctive. 

The necessity for CXOs to consider productivity, quality, and compliance improvements in addition to cost benefits from RPA projects was underlined in 2017 Deloitte research. Moreover, they noted a fourfold rise in respondents’ use of RPA projects between 2016 and 2017. 

Intelligent RPA and hyperautomation have been shown to help BFSI organizations with higher-level operations such as decision making and analysis. They are also useful in synchronizing and automating different business and IT procedures.

Summing it Up 

It is quite evident that digital transformation in the banking and financial service sector is accelerating. Soon almost every bank and the financial institution will have to contemplate and get digitalized to enhance user experience in sync with the latest technological trends. 

Even though the pandemic is in its last stages, online banking usage will undoubtedly expand, necessitating an improvement in the trustworthiness of their mobile app and website. There are companies that may give them services for testing their mobile applications and websites in order to deliver quality assistance. ImpactQA is a well-known software testing service company that oversees a specialized team of testers to provide quick testing solutions for BFSI apps. Our worldwide delivery methodology has shown itself to be a valuable tool in serving global clients in the banking, financial services, and insurance industries. Contact us to discuss your course of action.

The post Accelerating Digital Transformation in the BFSI Sector appeared first on ImpactQA.

With Enterprises increasingly leaning towards agile methodologies and DevOps integration, a smart testing strategy has become critical. The businesses are transforming digitally, they need a robust and full-proof test strategy that will ensure optimal efficiency and decrease software failures. Companies no longer have the luxury of time that they used to have with traditional SDLC. In such scenarios, Continuous Testing emerges as the only answer.

Continuous Testing mainly refers to unobstructed testing at each phase of a software development life cycle. The comprehensive study from Forrester and DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) shows that continuous testing is significant for the success of DevOps and other digital transformation proposals and initiatives. However, adoption levels of Continuous testing adoption are low, even though test teams had already started practicing DevOps. Those selective enterprises have already attained remarkable results in terms of accelerating innovation while reducing business risks and improving cost efficiency.

Why Continuous Testing Strategy?

DevOps is mainly considered as a philosophy and process that guides software testers, developers, and IT operations to produce more software releases at higher speeds and with better outcomes. On the other side, continuous delivery is the methodology that invokes DevOps principles.

Continuous Delivery is about automating tasks to reduce manual efforts in the process of constantly integrating software. This paces up to push the tested software into production. Expert QA team can make improvements along the way derived from continuous automated feedback about what truly works, and what is required to be done better.

The shift to experimentation is an essential part of making an agile landscape for digital transformation. The IT Companies can easily launch the perfectly working software, by adding additional functionality to existing systems and then work on improving and correcting the highly prioritized list of glitches. Even dealing with the critical issues in the shortest possible time with the tight feedback loops.

Continuous Delivery model also gives IT companies the agility and production readiness it requires to promptly respond to market changes. It makes your end products more stable, your teams more productive, and accelerate your flexibility to facilitate fast and continuous innovation everywhere. Additionally, you can drive faster growth, help the business expand into new areas, and compete in the digital age with the improved responsiveness that this model reflects.

Four Sub-dimensions of Continuous Deployment

Using SAFe for Continuous Delivery:

• Deploy to production- Covers the skills required to deploy a solution to a production environment
• Verify the solution – Encompasses the skills required to confirm the changes operate in production as planned before they are released to customers
• Monitor for problems- Covers the skills to check and report on solutions
• Respond and recover- Includes the skills to rapidly tackle any issues that happen during deployment

Agile and DevOps Digital Transformation- The Three Ways

With the sprawling foothold of Agile and DevOps, backed by continuous testing, companies can follow ‘The Three Ways’ explained in The Phoenix Project to optimize business processes and increase profitability. These ways stand true for both the businesses as well as IT processes.

The 3 ways guiding the ‘Agile and DevOps’ digital transformation are:

• Work should flow in one direction- downstream
• Create, shorten, and amplify feedback loops
• Continuous experimentation, to learn from mistakes and attain mastery

These three ways assist in imparting direct client value by integrating the best quality in products while managing efficiency and speed.

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Managing Continuous Integration with Jenkins

DevOps is Key to enable Continuous delivery

Continuous delivery perfectly suits companies that are well-equipped with a collaborative DevOps culture. In a continuous paradigm, you can’t afford silos and handoffs between operation and development teams. If an organization does not embrace a DevOps-based culture, they will face complexity in building IT and development environments that are needed to compete in the digital era.

It is a concern when professionals need to focus on relentless improvement in technology. In different cases, it calls for an important shift in mindset. For example, to achieve the continuous delivery objective is to speed up releases and improve software quality, and for that we need to make a smooth shift-left of a series of activities like security and continuous testing. This necessitates cross-functional and proactive communication at each level of the organizations to bridge the gap that has traditionally existed among the businesses.

Instituting such culture will also encourage autonomous teams. Development and operations teams need to get empowered to make their own decisions, without having to undergo complicated decision-making processes.

Industry Insights

Digital transformation, Agile, and DevOps will continuously thrive, and become the norm. It is time that companies should start taking it seriously to transform digitally. Irrespective of the tools and methodologies used, digital transformation efforts will fail without a continuous testing strategy.

Digital transformation, Agile, and DevOps are together building a future where innovation is at the heart of all the processes. But this picture needs continuous testing to become truly complete. Integrating Continuous Testing with the existing system will enable organizations to proactively respond to glitches, and instigate stability in their products.

ImpactQA experts with years of experience in Continuous Integration can configure and execute the most popular tools like Jenkins, Bamboo, Microsoft TFS and more.

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AGILE – A term coined in 2011 by a small group of people who were tired of the traditional approach of Software Management of developing projects.

Agile helps teams to provide fast and unpredictable responses to the feedback they receive on their projects.

The 12 principles of agile development include:

1. Customer satisfaction through early & continuous software delivery

Clients are happier if they don’t have to wait for extended periods of time and receive working software at timely intervals between releases.

2. Accommodate changing needs throughout the development process

Whenever there is a change in requirement or feature, it should not cause a delay in the development process and get accommodated easily in the software.

3. Frequent delivery of working software

As Scrum operates in software sprints or iterations, this ensures regular delivery of working software.

4. Collaboration between the developers & business stakeholders during the project

Better decisions are made when the business and technical team collaborate.

5. Support, belief, & motivate the people involved

The unhappy teams cannot deliver their best like the motivated teams. So, support and trust are needed on the team.

6. Enable face-to-face interactions

There is no miscommunication when teams are co-located which not only saves time but also gives better interaction result.

7. Working software is the prime measure of improvement

The ultimate measure of progress is delivering functional software to the customer.

8. Agile processes to support a consistent development pace

Agile process establishes a routine through which teams establish an iterative and maintainable speed through which they can deliver functional software, and they repeat it with each release.

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Core Benefits of Agile Project Management

9. Attention to technical aspects & design enhances agility

The apt skills and righteous design ensures the team can maintain the speed, constantly improve the product and back up the change.

10. Simplicity

Develop just enough to get the job done at the moment.

11. Teams which are self-organized encourage great designs, requirements, and architectures

Motivated and Dexterous team members who have the decisiveness, take ownership and interact regularly with other members of the team and share designs that deliver standard products.

12. Regular reflections on how to become more and more effective

Self-evolution, process betterment, advancing expertise, and techniques help the team members to work more coherently.

The aim of Agile is to merge development with the business needs, and the success of Agile is evident. Agile projects are customer-centric and advocate customer guidance and engagement. Because of this, Agile has grown to be an overall view of software development throughout the software development industry and an industry all by itself.

What is a Digital Transformation?

It is the unification of digital technology into all areas of business, radically changing how you utilize and yield value to customers. It is also an aesthetic change that requires organizations to continuously confront the status quo, investigate, and get comfortable with unfulfillment. 

Digital Transformation is the unprecedented use of digital technology to resolve conventional problems. These digital solutions capacitate inherently new types of innovation and artistry, rather than simply upgrade and support conventional methods.

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Digital Transformation with Continuous Testing

What is Agile Digital Transformation?

An agile transformation is an act of transfiguring an organization’s form or nature gradually to one that is able to accept and advance in an adaptable, cooperative, self-organizing, fast wavering environment. The Agile Manifesto values and principles can be followed and taught throughout any type of establishment as it does not just apply to development teams.

The whole establishment needs to interpret the clarity of an agile transformation and the value of it in order to gain from the rewards of achieving true, healthy agility. The whole cultural and organizational mindset must change to one that embraces a culture of self-organization and collaboration.

Principles of Agile Digital Transformation:

PRINCIPLE 1:  START WITH A TRANSFORMATIVE VISION

As per a recent Gartner survey, 63% of business leaders stipulated they don’t exactly know what would be the possibilities of next-generation technology. Not astonishingly, just 13% of respondents said they have discovered the next paramount digital business technology investment. The reason for this is that the company lacks a transformation vision that will plan out a digital strategy and, more importantly, give the business the ability to measure progress and make real-time adjustments to improve outcome. Superior management must create, be coherent, and interface the compelling future digital vision.  Transfiguration does not happen bottom

-up.

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Testing in Agile with Behavior Driven Development

PRINCIPLE 2:  FOCUS ON BUILDING DIGITAL CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

Successful digital transformations are always built on front-end customer experience, unlike traditional digital projects. There should be more and more exposure to new growth opportunities by adding digital features to products as well as by changing direction and considering how the products and their services adapt to the digital customer. To create a value we need not use technologies and tools as an integrated package instead there should be sets of applications that can automate the user experience through social, data, cloud and mobile.

PRINCIPLE 3:  SUPPORT THE VISION WITH SECURE DIGITAL PLATFORMS

The organizations must always prioritize risks germane as per their specific operation. As the hottest application in need is for security, there should be smart tools to manage the risks for detecting the intrusions quickly and to respond in real time. The key to liberating the existing IT assets and enabling digital innovation with growth is the interface to digital components. The security of assets and data is paramount, the right strategy will support the speed, safety, and growth required in today’s digital economy.

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Agile Testing: Best Practices and Methodology

PRINCIPLE 4: DRIVE INSIGHT WITH DATA-DRIVEN VISUALIZATION

The growing digital organizations not only persistently collect data but identify and envision that data in a context that induces insights that can be acted upon. The solution to unlocking real-time data intelligence for zestful and unified customer engagement is comprehending and address customer personas and micro-segments.

Traditionally companies have a reasonably strong foundation of sales transactional data. However, this data often lacks the necessary dimensionality to create meaningful demographic, attitudinal, and predictive insights. In addition, data rarely is augmented by leveraging publically available and purchased data.

Many organizations are using data visualization to communicate information clearly and efficiently to users through statistical graphics, plots, infographics, and dynamic tables and charts. Effective envisions helps users in examining and reasoning data and documentation.

PRINCIPLE 5: EMBRACE DIGITAL AGILITY TO CREATE ADVANTAGE

Due to the constantly changing customer and market conditions, Business leaders often wrestle to execute extensive projects. The conventional business model features unconnected, unintegrated platforms by business function and projects with 6-18 month lifecycles. Oftentimes, by the time the project is accomplished, market and user requirements have changed with success criteria and ROI seldom realized.

To circumvent these perils, firms must grab adaptable differentiation by developing a “digital agility advantage” that allows a company to embrace market and operational changes as a matter of routine through the use of digital technologies. Digital agility initiatives are rooted in 30-day sprints with new iterations built better and faster. This allows a company to constantly evaluate and modify – the concept of learning, launch, re-learn, re-launch – rectifying the perspective in attainable iterations. Thriving organizations in the digital age must exhibit an awareness of how to be agile; only then, they would be able to execute in an agile way.

The post Agile Digital Transformation appeared first on ImpactQA.

With technology being embraced in all aspects of our lives, its influence is expanding. Organizations want to fully take advantage of this growth, leading many to go through a total digital transformation to accelerate processes, develop innovations, and embrace opportunities. Quality assurance has an integral role in the journey of digital transformation. Implementing quality checkpoints along the path assures the desired business outcomes, as well as end-user satisfaction—the ultimate objective.

A complete digital transformation affects business processes at every level. Quality assurance efforts strengthen the product at each transition throughout the development lifecycle and mitigate challenges posed by new technology. QA is in the best supporting role in any organization’s digital initiative to safeguard performance and security. Luckily, enterprises advancing in the direction of expanded digitalization already recognize the associated risks and see the big picture of quality challenges. Therefore, many of them do not hesitate to expand their quality measures and spend a larger chunk of their IT budget on QA alone. Good quality assurance measures meet the three major objectives of a company’s digital transformation: protecting the corporate image, increasing quality awareness, and ensuring end-user satisfaction. Let’s break down these critical aspects. Protecting the customer experience and brand: QA efforts measure end-user experiences across multiple digital platforms. This improves accessibility, reduces response time, and increases the consistency of the brand. A good QA program can address the challenges of testing customer experience in multi-channel solutions:

• Getting the right coverage of end-user expectations and requirements in the test set
• Implementing and using test tools for customer experience testing
• Designing test cases
• Establishing environments and test data for customer experience testing

Lifecycle Automation: QA speeds up the transformation process not only by application-level automation but also by lifecycle automation. Apart from taking advantage of conventional automation, QA focuses on testing the entire lifecycle, thus assuring cross-platform compatibility and customer-experience testing. Quality user experience is a competency that’s not just related to the dev or testing team. Rather, it’s something that you need to work for as an entire unit. This is exactly what can be achieved with DevOps and test-driven development. Advanced analytics data support: QA makes use of advanced analytical technologies to mine data from various social and commercial platforms that can be used in productive decision-making. This gives quality insight into all stages of the end-to-end customer experience.A good QA program provides the most complete quality view, allowing dev teams to execute and analyze manual, automated, and performance tests for digital channels side by side, on desktop browsers and real mobile devices, under real end-user conditions. With this expansion, users can apply a single quality strategy to deliver seamless, responsive web and multichannel experiences.

Security – The Driving Force of Digital Transformation When an organization introduces digital transformation in its processes, quality assurance too becomes important. And in times companies are switching over to the digital mode in a bid to stay ahead of competition, and automation testing is helping them deliver increased efficiency. According to Raffi Margaliot, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Application Delivery Management, at HP Software,“Technology disruptions such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, and mobility are leading to faster business transformations than ever before. Companies have to pivot quickly in order to stay ahead of the curve, compete, and conform to the new style of business”.

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How Big Data can be leveraged in all aspects of Testing?

Organizations have increased their budget allocation for QA and digital testing and it will only go up in the coming years to ensure a perfect environment for their customers. Companies have realized that to stay ahead of the competition, they have to invest more in their IT budget. A report in 2015 found that 43% of executives foresee an increase in IT spending budgets and a 9% year-on-year increase in the budget directed towards testing and quality assurance. According to the experts, testing is critical when going digital. One of the biggest challenges in digital transformation is the security. Companies have to continuously invest in testing systems that ensure the integrity of their processes and applications. Digital security cannot be taken lightly by any organization that hopes to rise in business and wants to offer a smooth experience to its customers. Another reason why experts are in favor of testing is because these days the product life cycle is very short and there is a demand for greater agility. Organizations are modernizing their testing processes to meet these shorter life cycle programs. Digital Transformation has affected the way traditional business is done. There are a whole new set of processes that have to be incorporated in the system to deliver productive customer experiences and consequent business benefits. In view of tough competition, the need of the hour is for flexible and rapid delivery of software and systems. This is made possible only through the modes of testing, which themselves have evolved into a whole new process. Test automation is not enough by itself. What is needed is its integration with development processes so that testing becomes an integral part of overall business strategy.

Why Give QA a Seat at the Table? Nothing is new in the list of responsibilities I listed and QA has been performing some or all of these roles in many application development practices for some time. If you’re already investing in DevOps, you can’t achieve continuous delivery without factoring in some of these practices. The issue is that these needs are not given equal hearing in a DevOps transformation and QA seems to be getting step-motherly treatment and being squeezed out by their more aggressive Dev and Ops siblings. The mindset among many business and technical managers is that QA is still “the activity you do after the application is developed (they are still hooked up to the waterfall model although their teams have moved to agile development)”, and that developers should be writing bug-free code, and that whatever validations are required can be performed by the business or end users during UAT. Such projects are more likely to invest in additional developer resources if they believe it will gain them functionality or time to market. The CIO and IT leaders in these programs are then more likely to invest their efforts in maturing development (Dev) and operational practices (Ops) without learning quality assurance tools, best practices, and governance. This can also result in driving the project costs of such programs high. Whether you’d like some general advice with QA and Delivery issues or if you’d just like to say hello – you can reach us using these details. P: (214) 347-9928 or email: solutions@impactqa.com

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