Deploy innovative digital banking services ahead of competitors by accelerating development and testing processes.
This large Chinese bank operates through physical branches and digital channels to deliver a comprehensive range of retail banking services to its customers.
Around the world, customer expectations around banking are on the rise. Connected consumers now demand always-on access to their accounts from any digital device – and many are prepared to switch providers to get a more responsive service. For established banks, moving rapidly to deliver innovative digital services is a vital element in fostering customer loyalty and attracting a new generation of digital-native prospects. Aiming to drive growth in this way, a leading bank in China embarked on a far-reaching digital transformation initiative. The aim was to roll out high-quality online and mobile experiences for customers, built on a robust and future-ready core banking infrastructure.
A spokesperson for the bank explains: “Before we could bring brand-new online and mobile services to market, we needed to lay a solid foundation. One of our first tasks was to prepare more than 100 core banking applications to support the new digital capabilities. With our target launch date for the new online and mobile services racing towards us, we knew that a fast and efficient development process would be crucial in achieving on-time, on-budget delivery.”
In the past, the bank relied on traditional, waterfall-based approaches to development and application testing. The organization realized that these methodologies would significantly extend its time to market – increasing both costs and the risk of losing business to competitors, which were also developing online and mobile banking apps. To solve the challenge, the bank targeted an agile way of working that would accelerate key development and testing activities while allowing it to maintain a strong compliance and information security posture. “Long application release cycles are simply not fit for purpose in today’s banking industry,” confirms the spokesperson. “We looked for a solution that could help our teams of developers and application testers to collaborate more effectively.”
After evaluating offerings from other leading Application Delivery Management vendors, the bank selected Micro Focus solutions to help fast-track its development and testing processes without compromising on the quality of its deliverables. A pre-project report conducted by Micro Focus concluded that the bank could expect to achieve more than $60m in annual gains split evenly between IT cost reduction and improved operational efficiency. The report also highlighted a 50% gain time in defect remediation along with a 25% gain in manual testing execution.
The bank adopted Micro Focus ALM/Quality Center as its single source of truth for all test scenarios, test results and defect tracking activities. The solution also acts as an integrated communications tool, making it easier for testers and developers to collaborate on identifying and resolving defects. As a result, the bank can manage its application testing processes according to rigorous and fully transparent workflows. The Micro Focus solution also enables the bank keep track of its progress through real-time reporting into key performance indicators such as active defects, failed tests, and more.
As in other major economies worldwide, the Chinese banking sector is heavily regulated. A key regulation from the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission aims to control the quality of banking services. Enterprises that fail to comply can find their activities significantly restricted. Thanks to the automated reporting from ALM/Quality Center, the bank can supply, when required by audit, accurate results and KPI reporting that help it to demonstrate its adherence to this regulation.
By combining Micro Focus ALM/Quality Center and Micro Focus UFT One, fed by defect information from Micro Focus Sprinter, the bank can build and execute automated functional tests for key applications – from its traditional core banking systems to the cutting-edge online and mobile apps.
To ensure high performance for its applications, the bank has deployed Micro Focus LoadRunner Professional for more than 7,000 users, enabling it to drive comprehensive performance testing across a wide range of protocols, technologies and application environments, helping to ensure outstanding digital experiences for customers.
“One of the key reasons that we selected the Micro Focus solutions was their flexibility and versatility,” recalls the spokesperson. “Unlike other vendors we considered, Micro Focus offered us the ability to customize the solutions to support our preferred workflows.”
Working with Micro Focus, the bank configured its ADM solutions to support over 200,000 test cases for more than 200 applications. The testing environment for these applications is large and complex, spanning x86 and HP Superdome servers, virtual machines (KVM, VMware, Hyper-V) and private cloud infrastructure. End-user devices covered by automated testing include physical and cloud desktops, embedded Windows systems (for example, in ATMs) and mobile platforms. Thanks to the adoption of Agile methodology, the bank has shrunk its development cycles and is now able to achieve more than 100 releases per year.
“Thanks to our Micro Focus solutions, we’ve slashed the time and manual effort required to test our applications, contributing to faster and more efficient development overall and enabling us to launch our new online and mobile channels on time,” says the spokesperson.
As the bank attracts more customers with its seamless services, the Micro Focus solutions are scaling with the business. The organization’s user base for Micro Focus ALM/Quality Center has increased by 150% in the last 9 years, and employees are now using the solution to help build secure, performant and resilient applications that will scale to support over a billion transactions per day.
“We estimate that the combined effect of faster manual testing, automated functional testing and faster defect remediation is delivering multi-million-dollar cost-savings for the bank,” concludes the spokesperson. “Most important, we can now leverage lean and efficient development processes to help deliver the best possible experience for our customers—contributing to increased retention, higher satisfaction, and year-on-year business growth.”
