Banks are under growing pressure to deliver faster digital change without compromising resilience, customer trust, or the integrity of core systems.
As online banking becomes the primary interface for millions of customers, QA and software testing teams are being asked to support more frequent releases, tighter DevOps cycles, and stronger assurance over end-to-end business processes.
Across the sector, the shift toward iterative development has intensified the burden of regression testing, exposing the limits of manual execution and script-heavy automation frameworks that are costly to maintain.
In that environment, scalable, maintainable test automation is increasingly being treated not as a tooling upgrade, but as a strategic capability tied directly to operational resilience and digital competitiveness.
It is within this context that Auckland Savings Bank (ASB) has been reshaping its software testing and automation approach as part of a broader transformation of its development practices.
Auckland Savings Bank (ASB), New Zealand’s first savings bank and one of the country’s largets players, has spent more than 160 years building a reputation as one of the country’s most prominent retail and business banking providers, and in recent decades, as one of its most consistent digital innovators.
Established in 1847, ASB today serves more than a million personal, business, and rural customers, and has long positioned itself at the forefront of online banking delivery in the New Zealand market.
The bank introduced the country’s first internet banking site, FastNet Classic, in 1997, and has since “won numerous awards for its innovations,” including recognition as “New Zealand’s best online bank.”
But as ASB has shifted its technology strategy toward faster, more iterative software delivery, the pressures on quality assurance and regression testing have intensified, reflecting a broader challenge across banking: how to sustain release velocity, resilience, and customer trust while maintaining rigorous controls over digital change.
“ASB is transforming its software development capability towards iterative software development best practices, in order to maintain its competitive edge as the innovator in the New Zealand market,” according to a detailed case study report on the website of the bank’s global software partner Tricentis.
Regression pressure
With that move toward iterative development came a sharp increase in regression testing demand. Manual regression testing, ASB found, had become “a major scheduling and cost challenge,” and previous automation attempts failed to deliver sustainable outcomes.
Test suites built on script-heavy technologies required “high maintenance overheads,” were “complicated to use,” and ultimately drove the bank back toward expensive, labour-intensive manual testing.
For QA leaders inside the bank, the challenge was not simply automating for automation’s sake, but building a testing capability that could scale with digital banking expectations, including the resilience demands that come with always-on online services.
“Our TOSCA regression suite is highly maintainable, because of TOSCA’s model-based approach to test automation and its dynamic steering/functions,” explained Stephan Gianonatti, test automation & performance manager at Auckland Savings Bank, in the case study report.
Model-based automation
After evaluating automation approaches across multiple ASB environments, including “two HTML portal solutions, a native WIN32 application and SAP”, the bank selected Tricentis Tosca’s model-based testing approach over its in-house framework, citing usability, maintainability, and “significantly lower total cost of ownership.”
Model-based testing, the case study argued, avoids the “time-consuming and costly development and maintenance of test automation frameworks,” helping banks reduce long-term QA friction as systems evolve.
A dedicated team of four was established to automate the core regression suite for FastNet Classic, supported by subject matter experts across online banking.
Following training, the team adopted an incremental delivery approach grounded in risk-based test management, prioritising high business and technology risks early and demonstrating weekly progress to key stakeholders.
In less than five months, ASB automated a core regression suite comprising 1,100 test cases, nearly 12,000 test actions, and 92 end-to-end business process scenarios covering 1,797 verification points.
Faster defect discovery
The impact was not just efficiency, but earlier detection of defects, a critical resilience lever in banking environments where late-stage failures can quickly translate into customer disruption or operational risk.
“Defects are being detected much earlier than would have occurred with manual testing,” Gianonatti said. “Owing primarily to the fact that the full regression suite, including integration testing, system testing and end-to-end business process testing can now be executed on-demand in less than 12 hours.”
Execution effort for the core regression suite fell by 95%, dropping from more than 300 hours to fewer than 12 hours, including error log evaluation.
ASB’s objectives were clear: deliver more frequent releases of core online products while preserving the quality expectations tied to its market reputation.
“ASB needed to deliver more frequent releases of our core online products, reducing time to market,” explained Raewyn Ludlam, former Head of Test Services at ASB, who moved on to Planit Testing before retiring.
“We needed to maintain high levels of quality and ASB’s reputation as New Zealand’s best online bank whilst completing regression testing more quickly and more cost effectively,” she said in the Tricentis case study.
Further down the initiative, ASB pointed to the role of external partners in supporting the implementation, including Planit Testing, a specialist quality engineering and assurance provider.
“These needs were met by Tricentis and Planit, who worked with us to implement a new test automation solution leveraging TOSCA,” Ludlam said.
Together, the teams exceeded ASB’s original target of a 50% reduction in regression testing time, the case study report claimed.
Planit describes itself as an expert in quality engineering, with experience supporting cloud applications and complex backend integration through test automation.
Strategic banking capability
ASB frames test automation not as a tactical tooling upgrade, but as a strategic technology initiative supported at the highest operational levels of the bank.
“Test automation has been an important strategic initiative for technology within ASB and was strongly supported by Russell Jones, [ASB’s] chief operations officer,” Ludlam said.
She added that the structured approach brought together “business and technical SMEs, testers and automation specialists.”
Daily stand-ups enabled issues to be addressed “collaboratively and promptly,” and ASB delivered within budget while positioning itself to expand automation across other key applications.
For banking QA and software testing teams globally, ASB’s experience reflects a familiar direction of travel: regression automation, risk-based execution, and tighter collaboration between business analysts, testers, and automation engineers as digital resilience becomes inseparable from release engineering.
On-demand staffing models are also evolving as silos break down.
“We have broken the mould and is now engaging test analysts and business analysts alongside with their test automation team to develop automated test scenarios.”
In a market where customers expect uninterrupted online banking performance, and regulators increasingly scrutinise operational resilience, ASB’s QA transformation underscores how modern testing, including scalable automation and structured DevOps alignment, is becoming foundational to digital banking confidence.
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