Technology leaders at financial firms in Asia Pacific are aiming to mature their QA practices through both a customer experience and risk management lens.
On 24th November 2019, technology services giant Capgemini published Reimagine the Future of Quality Assurance, in partnership with Delphix, Neotys and Tricentis.
Customer experience, tooling evolution and market pressure in the age of Open Banking is driving QA innovation in financial services in Asia Pacific, according to the authors of the report.
“Moving to Agile is [a way of] thinking about what the outcome needs to be for the customer from the start,” states Jarrod Sawers, Head of Enterprise Delivery at AIA. “Performance testing is a perfect example.”
But ambitious transformation programs must be supported by fit-for-class tooling. Without effective, foundational automation, reactive security assurance creates software delivery bottlenecks.
“Where there is a fit, we build full, secure CI/CD pipelines,” says Raoul Hamilton-Smith, General Manager of Product Architecture and CTO for Equifax New Zealand. “QA practices [help] safeguard our information assets. As a result of improving our security posture, we [can] now release software more frequently.”
As QA Vector® Research asserted in September 2019, financial firms should consider a spectrum of release frequency to reduce operational risk.
“The role of quality assurance is expanding, to [ensure] that all regulatory obligations have been met,” stated Mark Zanetich, Head of Technology Risk Compliance for I&O at Westpac. “It is vital to get decisions up the chain quickly and concisely – reporting has to happen almost in real time.”
In the past two years, both the Hayne Royal Commission into misconduct in the Australian financial services sector and the Banking Executive Accountability reforms, which came into effect in 2018, have codified the responsibility for operational risk held by technology executives at financial institutions.
“QA teams are increasingly part of the business,” according to Nicki Doble, Group CIO for Cover-More. “Automated performance testing, paired with continuous testing, [is] required to instil confidence.”
So, firms seeking to automate regulatory compliance – and ultimately to reduce operational risk – should establish effective data governance and performance testing practices.
