Swiss retail lender Basler Kantonalbank has overhauled its testing approach around its core banking platform as increasing release cycles, digital channels and integration layers place new demands on software quality assurance.
For QA and software testing teams in financial services, the bank’s experience illustrates a broader shift underway across the sector: traditional manual testing processes are proving insufficient as banks push for faster releases while maintaining regulatory compliance, data integrity and operational resilience.
Basler Kantonalbank, a more than 100-year-old institution serving retail and SME customers in Switzerland, relies on the Avaloq core banking platform to support critical banking operations such as customer information, transactions and balances.
Its wider technology estate also includes digital channels, mobile banking and fintech microservices that depend on the core platform for data and processing.
As these systems became more interconnected and the pace of innovation accelerated, testing complexity increased significantly.
The bank faced a situation common across modern banking architectures: multiple releases per year combined with complex integrations between core systems, mobile applications and APIs.
Manual testing, however, was struggling to keep pace.
According to the case study, published by the bank’s vendor partner Tricentis on the company’s website, 10,000 manual test cases were run annually against Avaloq for its 5 releases per year at Basler Kantonalbank, covering 42% of the application’s business risk.
For QA teams, the implications were clear. Even extensive manual testing activity delivered limited coverage of the bank’s operational risk exposure across the core platform.
End-to-end testing
Like many banks using Avaloq, Basler Kantonalbank operates a data-intensive environment in which multiple business functions rely on the core platform. That includes digital banking channels, transaction processing and a range of connected applications.
The bank found that manual testing processes could not keep up with the increasing pace of change across these interconnected systems.
The Tricentis case study noted that “manual testing was a longstanding challenge” because Avaloq is “a data heavy system.”
At the same time, the bank wanted to accelerate innovation and deliver new features to customers more quickly.
Increasing release frequency and ensuring reliable integrations across the banking stack meant that testing had to move beyond isolated component checks toward end-to-end validation.
Testing demands were also amplified by regulatory expectations around data privacy, reporting and system stability, factors that make quality assurance a critical control function inside financial institutions.
From manual testing to large-scale automation
To address these pressures, Basler Kantonalbank sought a way to increase testing speed, coverage and reliability across its core banking environment.
The bank ultimately adopted an automated approach designed to support end-to-end testing across multiple technologies within its application stack.
The transformation focused on increasing the number of test cases executed and expanding risk coverage across Avaloq and surrounding systems.
The case study explained that Basler Kantonalbank hired Tricentis for the firm’s test automation technology to “increase the speed and efficiency of their end-to-end testing.”
The bank deployed the Tricentis Tosca testing platform, which supports automated testing across data-heavy applications as well as APIs, mobile systems and microservices. Tosca is a model-based automation platform designed to execute end-to-end testing scenarios across enterprise applications.
Scaling testing to match banking release cycles
The impact on testing scale and release cadence was significant. Within two years, the bank dramatically increased the volume of tests it executed against the Avaloq platform.
According to the case study, Basler Kantonalbank “tripled the number of test cases they run each year with Tricentis test automation and a goal of reaching 50,000 test cases run for Avaloq alone in the next year.”
That increase in automated testing also allowed the bank to accelerate its release cadence.
The new testing capability “enabled them to increase the number of Avaloq releases each year by 15%, and growing.”
“Manual testing was a longstanding challenge because [of the bank’s] data heavy system.”
– Tricentis case study report
For QA teams in banking and insurance firms, the case highlighted a growing reality: end-to-end testing is becoming essential as core platforms like Avaloq sit at the centre of increasingly complex digital ecosystems.
When banking platforms connect to mobile apps, APIs, fintech services and internal systems, defects or data errors can propagate rapidly across multiple channels.
Automated end-to-end testing therefore becomes a key mechanism for validating not just individual applications, but the entire digital banking workflow.
Lessons for banking QA
Basler Kantonalbank’s experience reflects a broader shift across the financial services industry.
As banks push toward agile delivery and faster release cycles, QA teams must expand testing coverage across entire technology stacks, from core banking systems to digital channels and microservices.
Manual testing approaches alone struggle to deliver the scale and risk coverage required in these environments.
Automated end-to-end testing, particularly around core platforms such as Avaloq, is increasingly emerging as a central pillar of quality engineering strategies inside banks.
For financial institutions facing growing digital complexity, the case illustrates how scaling test automation can enable both faster releases and stronger control over business-critical banking systems.
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