Breakfast Roundtable: Payment system assurance through testing

Are banks truly getting to grips with the demands of testing in today’s ever challenging environment? Particularly, when the spotlight and media focus are ever present and the risk of failure is great, both financial and reputational? So how do banks handle this today? What new technologies and methods are there and how can these be integrated into current processes? These issues and more are examined in the sentiment paper - “Payment System Assurance - Reducing Risk Through Effective Testing” - by Iliad Solutions in association with Finextra. 

The paper can be downloaded at: https://www.finextra.com/researcharticle/26/payment-system-assurance--reducing-risk-through-effective-testing

To build on and debate the paper’s findings a group of senior representatives from the industry, drawn from many financial institutions met to discuss and assess the quality of payments related testing approaches and systems used by banks. What works well and what can be improved? How to reduce risk through more effective test methods?

Iliad opened the debate, the banks responded and the session was a wide-ranging sharing of opinion on the issues and challenges associated with the testing of bank payment systems in development. In addition to confirming and supporting many of the conclusions reached in the sentiment paper, the discussions showed that the banks face a common set of testing-related issues and problems:

• There is challenge in transitioning to an Agile, iterative approach to Development Ops but it is an objective.
• There are benefits to working with fintechs to comply with regulatory pressures (e.g. PSD2) and enable greater competition without compromising on security and service availability.
• However there is a need for vetting or certification of new fintechs; to assist banks in finding the right partners.
• The dependency on staff is important and the loss / retention of key resource – particularly SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) and the knowledge they have is a key management issue.
• Managing systems’ architecture - connecting legacy core platforms with new app-based devices, and the complexity of their overall payments infra-structure is uppermost of mind.
• Dealing with multiple, and sometimes conflicting, agendas within their banks e.g. regulatory compliance, reducing costs, increasing operation efficiency, digitisation transformation and, meeting more demanding customer expectations to drive income generation.
• How to find the optimum balance between “partner, buy, build” in developing systems infra-structure.
• Managing and scheduling frequent change, often ‘in-flight’ in a risk adverse manner. Handling ‘change contention’ and the advantages and disadvantages of moving to a ‘continuous implementation’ approach.

The sentiment paper’s demonstration of the “high price of failure” to banks when their systems fail also resonated with those present. It is a priority issue. The roundtable concluded with a valuable discussion around how best to convince ‘C-level’ executives of the need for their organisation to invest in enhanced testing capabilities, and how best to articulate the reasons why testing and assurance are so critical to banks. The debate moves on and it is clear that in the future, testing would benefit from a move away from the current approach adopted by most financial institutions to a more strategic, assurance based methodology with the proven benefits it brings.