Banking applications have become the essentials to have on our smartphones. Yet, with all the simplicity and convenience they offer, their complex nature remains unchanged and comes with specific considerations. For users, it is setting strong passwords and being cautious about personal data and permissions. For banks, it is rigorous testing and a comprehensive approach to quality assurance.
Banking application testing is the basis of robust functionality and trust-building reputation. In this article, we’ll provide a glimpse into the testing challenges and processes. We’ll also share some tips that might help you prepare an effective QA strategy.
Banking applications operate at the intersection of technology, finance, and security. Compared to most digital products, this software handles more sensitive financial data. On top of that, banking apps process critical transactions and must maintain absolute reliability under diverse and demanding conditions.
Every tap, swipe, and transaction carries the weight of customer trust, financial security, and institutional reputation. And a single vulnerability or performance issue can have significant consequences, potentially exposing users to financial risks or causing substantial reputational damage to the institution.
So, in an era where a single line of code can protect or compromise millions of dollars, banking application testing has become the unsung hero of digital finance. To account for all its particularities, you need to get experienced QA engineers in your team or partner with a banking app testing company.
There’s no universal strategy you can use for banking app testing without any adjustments. Still, the core stages, types of testing, and focus points are pretty much standard: you start with manual testing services, add automation when viable, and continuously improve your QA flows as the functionality and user base expand.
Let’s take a look at what QA checks should become an inseparable part of your development pipeline.
Banking application functional testing forms the backbone of banking application QA. Its purpose is to validate that every feature and workflow operates exactly as intended. Simply put, you are to check whether the app does what it’s intended to do. Key areas of focus include:
On the surface, it looks like the goal of functional testing is simply checking if features work. But it goes beyond that. It’s about ensuring they work precisely, consistently, and securely in every possible scenario.
UI testing focuses on the visual part of banking applications—interfaces. The latter are expected to provide clear, consistent, and user-friendly experiences to accommodate complex financial interactions. The ultimate goal is to make financial management look and feel simple. The things you need to test for this are:
Altogether, these things let you transform complex financial workflows into easily navigable digital experiences. If you can reduce user cognitive load and enhance overall satisfaction, you’ll offload the support center and your staff in places and get a more loyal audience.
Accessibility testing extends your client base by making your application better suited for all audiences. It takes down the barriers that prevent interaction with or access to your app for people with physical disabilities, situational disabilities, and socio-economic restrictions on bandwidth and speed. Some of its key elements are the following:
Accessibility testing is now a legal requirement imposed by governments in most countries. Mandatory or not, tech teams should aim to create truly inclusive technologies. Providing equal financial access regardless of individual abilities or technological constraints benefits both users and businesses.
While accessibility testing adapts your banking application to be suitable for different humans, compatibility testing does a similar thing, but with their smartphones. People use a vast variety of devices, all with different hardware and specifications. The only way to make sure the application is equally usable on all is to test its behavior on:
In addition, you need to check for smooth performance with integrated third-party tools and systems. Comprehensive compatibility testing will ensure that customers can access their financial services seamlessly, regardless of the technology used.
Performance testing isn’t just simple speed measurements. For banking applications, it’s primarily about maintaining optimal performance under diverse and demanding conditions. A few examples of critical performance testing aspects include:
These tests help banks understand the true capacity of their applications and identify potential bottlenecks. In the end, the very sense of having a banking application is to enable users to perform financial transactions independently and at a convenient moment. And for that, you must secure constant uptime with the same high performance regardless of the traffic.
Banking applications must adhere to a complex web of financial regulations. Compliance testing ensures that applications meet stringent legal and industry standards. Key compliance testing focuses on:
Compliance testing is not a one-time event but a continuous process of validation and adaptation. As your application changes grows, you need to make sure it remains compliant with the regulations. And vice versa: when new requirements are introduced, you need to account for them, too.
Cybersecurity is perhaps the most critical aspect of banking application QA. In an era of sophisticated cyber threats, it’s mandatory. Defenses should evolve at least as quickly as viruses and scams, but ideally, even quicker. The basic digital security components to implement and thoroughly check include the following:
Modern banking application security testing employs advanced techniques like penetration testing, simulated cyber-attack scenarios, and others to uncover potential vulnerabilities proactively.
Keep in mind that security testing of banking application requires highly specialized expertise. It’s best to delegate software testing to QA engineers regardless of the case. Yet, security checks are not the tasks you can distribute between product team members and expect objective feedback.
Given the diversity of mandatory checks, you’ll need several in-house QA engineers to strengthen your team or QA outsourcing services to set up the entire process for you.
About 73% of the world’s interactions with banks now take place through digital channels. Meanwhile, 63% of bank account holders processed banking-related tasks on their smartphone or tablet in 1Q 2024. Experts foresee mobile payments will grow at a CAGR of 29% from 2020 to 2027. Long story short, mobile banking application testing deserves special attention in your QA strategy.
From a subjective viewpoint, mobile apps for banking have become much more convenient during these past few years. If you’re a regular user (meaning you’re not a B2B user), it’s hardly anything you can’t manage with a mobile app (or we’ve been lucky to have only positive experiences out here).
So, web and mobile banking applications introduce unprecedented convenience, and each can be slightly more convenient for tackling specific tasks. Mobile banking apps have become the preferred choice for many due to their accessibility and on-the-go functionality. Meanwhile, this convenience comes with unique challenges in terms of security and user experience.
In practical terms, it means preparing mobile-specific test cases/scenarios and including a variety of device + OS version + browser combinations on your checklist. The essentials of mobile testing in the banking domain should include:
Mobile banking app testing must simulate real-world scenarios, accounting for the unpredictable nature of mobile device usage. And given that we’re entering the AI phase in software, it’s best to prepare your mobile apps to the evolution and new features that may be soon required by the demanding users (if you haven’t done it yet).
Ultimately, we’d need to take a look at your specific app to prepare a more tailored answer. The backbone of a banking application is more or less the same, regardless of a bank and purpose. So that’s what we’ll focus on for now.
The following examples of what to test can help you determine how the testing goes and add what’s missing to the plan. If not, consider delegating this to professional banking application testing services. Our dedicated QA team can help with that.
1) Cross-browser compatibility:
2) Session management and security:
3) Transaction workflow:
For complex and time-consuming scenarios, consider automated software testing services. For example, risk-based test automation, prioritizing test cases based on critical business functions, helps protect high-risk areas. Implementing autotests in your CI/CD pipeline allows for better and smarter test coverage.
Speaking of what you can automate, stick to the general rules: choose cases that are frequently run, cover stable functionality, have clear positive/negative results, etc.
Every banking app is the result of technology, security, and regulatory compliance converging. And that’s what to the great extent defines the challenges of quality assurance and testing in this domain. Also, these challenges are not static. They evolve continuously, driven by technological advancements, changing customer expectations, and increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.
Rapid technological evolution. Modern banking applications must integrate multiple technologies, including cloud infrastructure, microservices architectures, real-time data processing systems, and advanced security mechanisms.
This technological complexity demands:
Legacy system integration. Many banks operate with complex legacy systems, creating unique testing challenges:
Dynamic regulatory landscape. Financial regulations are constantly evolving. This requires continuous compliance monitoring, rapid adaptation of testing protocols, and close collaboration with legal and compliance teams. Only awareness and cross-functional cooperation allow for the implementation of flexible testing frameworks.
Global compliance requirements. Testing must address variations in international banking regulations and region-specific security and privacy standards. There are cross-border transaction complexities, localization testing for different markets, and other aspects to account for.
Emerging cyber threat landscape. Being an extremely attractive target for hackers and scammers, banking applications face increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. Those include advanced persistent threats, social engineering attacks, complex financial fraud mechanisms, rapidly evolving hacking techniques, and many more.
Data privacy complexities. In addition to everything mentioned above, quality assurance must address stringent data protection regulations. It’s critical to implement and validate advanced encryption methodologies and user data anonymization techniques. Comprehensive privacy impact assessments should be a part of the QA strategy and repeated on a regular basis.
Brand and design consistency. It’s critical to ensure uniform design and functionality across multiple platforms. It doesn’t only save your resources on development but also helps users navigate the app regardless of the device they use. Otherwise, the app demands extra learning and causes frustration.
Usability assessment. Banks must ensure their applications are accessible to users with varying technical proficiencies. These apps must be intuitive across different age groups and technological backgrounds. Meanwhile, they must be responsive and performant under diverse usage scenarios.
Real-world performance simulation. Modeling complex, multi-channel banking interactions is mandatory. The team should simulate peak load scenarios and check the app’s behavior under network instability. This requires a special setup and additional tools, as manual checks will be insufficient here.
Adapting the software to growth. As the application’s architecture and the amount of user data it processes increase, the bank needs to adjust both software and hardware accordingly. On the QA side, it means testing all scalability-related aspects, which requires specific expertise.
To begin with, quality assurance requires constant adaptation—to the changes in your application, as well as tools, trends, threats, and so on. QA is a strategic imperative that directly impacts an organization’s reliability, security, and customer trust. And banking software makes it crystal clear. Here are a few things to begin with when building your QA strategy:
Finally, build a framework for continuous improvement. Gather detailed feedback from testing and integrate it into the app’s improvement. Make sure to include user feedback in the quality assurance process.
The most successful financial institutions view quality assurance as a critical investment in customer trust and operational excellence. They also understand that internet banking app testing is not a destination but a continuous journey. Technology advances. Customer expectations evolve. Testing methodologies must adapt and improve.
Those who master the art and science of comprehensive application testing will emerge as the true innovators in the financial technology ecosystem. It’s all because your banking application is more than just software—it’s a promise. A promise of security, accessibility, reliability, and innovation.
Mobile accessibility testing seems to be looking at its breakthrough years. And your business' response…
It all depends on how you use it. Sorry to everyone looking for a simple…
Software accessibility is not optional. Inclusive digital experiences are required by governments. And they aren't…
Accessibility testing evolved from a compliance exercise to a core component of user experience strategy.…
Browser compatibility testing explores whether websites and web applications function correctly across different browsers. It…
Financial technology has undergone a dramatic transformation in recent decades—or even in recent years. We've…