Among the confirmed cases are employees at outsourcing firms that provide back-office operations for large organisations, including several banks. According to Reuters, as far back as 2012 more than three-quarters of global banks had a direct or third-party offshore presence in India. Outsourcing to English-speaking, low-cost countries brings the benefit of accessing specialist expertise at a drastically reduced cost. But, at what risk?
Four years later, the COVID-19 pandemic is putting our bank’s systems under enormous pressure, while outsourcing groups in lower-cost countries such as India and the Philippines are working around the clock to upgrade their networks and enable staff to work from home.
The risk of outages for banks is higher than ever, but the risk of short-term strategies to tackle this situation is even more dangerous. Banks must find a solution that is both immediately effective and strategically innovative to preserve their quality and reputation, protect customers, cut costs and, above all, increase resilience. Let’s think about Quality Assurance testing, for instance.
Many institutions are still relying on manual testing practices, but as COVID-19 is showing us, this resource-intensive model is unsustainable and exposes banks to enormous risks. It also happens to be slow, prone to human errors and is therefore expensive.
An alternative testing approach is using automation tools. Traditional test automation based on Selenium, Gauge, Cucumber and others proved a great innovation when introduced several years ago. However, maintaining automated scripts has proven challenging and expensive. It is also inefficient as test coverage remains partial, and defect triage and analysis is still too slow.
So, what alternatives do banks have to test strategically, ensure their platforms and processes are resilient and reduce costs?
Using anonymised production data, our team of Quality Assurance experts can rapidly validate vast volumes of test cases and scenarios, significantly reduce the duration of test cycles, analyse and identify defects faster and reduce errors to almost zero.
My team recently completed a large SEPA and International Payments Regulatory Change Programme for a client using the RedCompass Labs QAaaS model. Our team of five test analysts executed over 60,000 test cases in one month, uncovered defects that could not be surfaced by traditional methods and cut the cost of testing by more than 20%. The outcome was a successful go-live without a single customer-impacting defect.
Being strategic and focused on the future will be key for banks to see the light at the end of the tunnel. The decisions that we make today will determine the very survival of our institutions tomorrow.