Launching new products and services into the financial services market is fraught with risk. Each year, businesses in the financial services sector lose £2.45 billion through poor testing processes alone. Quality Assurance (QA) deficiencies pose a significant risk to the entire business and must be considered as business critical.
Assured Thought is seeing the growing trend that even the largest, most well established players can run into problems by putting out products that aren’t yet ready, or that haven’t been tested thoroughly enough.
For smaller players, the risks posed by immature testing and QA processes are much higher.
QA processes are the crucial framework for testing the functional and technical elements of the software development process. With efficient QA processes in place, continuous testing practices can be implemented to improve the quality of software, reduce the time it takes to get products market ready and lower the costs of production.
Without efficient QA processes in place, fintechs face three key problems: a lack of control over the product or service, a lack of speed and a lack of rigour.
The culmination of these three challenges is a significant level of risk - threatening product development and the business as a whole. Without having efficient QA processes in place, businesses run the following five risks when bringing products to market:
Legal - Missed regulatory and compliance requirements can lead to fines and reputational damage.
Ethical - Unmet commitments and promises made to clients, employees and shareholders leads to integrity loss and, again, reputational damage.
Failures - System failures in a product that is live and being used by customers erodes trust and costs time and money to fix.
Delay - Projects overrunning and, in some cases being abandoned, waste a huge amount of time, leading to financial losses, opportunity cost, frustrated staff and write-offs.
Financial losses - Product launches or updates that fail to deliver for the business are likely to deliver a negative return on investment.
Daniel Dore, CEO and Founder of Assured Thought said: “Many financial companies face huge operational challenges as they head into 2023. Established financial organisations have problems with business agility and moving away from legacy infrastructure.
Newer financial services businesses can overlook the importance of investing in QA personnel, processes and technology. In both scenarios, we have seen the detrimental impact this can have first-hand, the risks posed by rushing new software through the development process without rigorous testing are very real and can set the whole business back.”
Taking affirmative action to ensure all technical aspects of a new product reach the high standards necessary to be successful in the financial services market is crucial. Having robust and efficient QA processes in place as early-on in the business’s growth cycle as possible sets fintechs on the road to success.
コメント