By Anand Vyas
Head of Banking, Financial Services and Insurance, SQS UK
The mobile payments ecosystem is potentially one of the most complex and disruptive the banking industry has witnessed.
Flexibility, speed and quality are the cornerstones of successful mobile payments app and software development. Through test automation, agile development, open source software, security testing and test management, banks can deliver effective systems as well as accelerate speed to market and reduce costs.
The mobile payments ecosystem, however, is highly complex, bringing together six different industries: financial institutions, retailers, wireless, traditional and mobile payment services as well as device manufacturers. An added dimension is the competition between startups and established players. The pressure to be first past the post is huge. And the prize is enviable — a mobile payments system that consumers are willing to widely adopt.
As m-payments are taking a foothold across the world, following successes such as M-Pesa in Kenya and advanced apps in Japan, the pressure is on participating banks. The U.K. banking industry, for instance, is now investing heavily in mobile payments, with the nationwide launch of Paym. Barclays is also adding new functionality to Pingit and five banks are launching Zapp in autumn 2014.
With such a complex ecosystem and fast pace of development, the possibilities for software failure are high and can impose security risks, damage brands, cause inconvenience and loss of customer trust and rack up hefty costs for fixes. Implementing quality and adapting effective software solutions are paramount to ensure a good customer experience, data security and timely delivery – and ultimately to remain competitive.
Some essential technologies and methodologies for successful mobile payments are:
Adopting test automation to ensure quality across thousands of variables:The quality of a mobile payments application is critical to successful consumer take-up. However, banks can no longer rely on manually testing mobile payments applications as there are too many variables. For Android alone, over 420 devices and 29 versions of the operating system have been released since 2007. For mobile payments, test automation is almost always necessary. It’s too complicated to mitigate a significant number of risks, diverse hardware, software and network combinations as well as the many test data permutations to be exercised. An effective test automation strategy with clear requirements, rationalization of devices and limiting the number of combinations of operating system will provide clear benefits such as accelerating speed to market, significant savings and proven practices that embrace consumer expectations.
Embracing agile development to pilot and roll out innovative services quickly: With no worldwide mobile payments standard, financial institutions need to be flexible and adopt a dynamic approach to software development to ensure they will not find themselves backing a losing horse. Accepting that change is inevitable in the first step, while retaining the flexibility to change horses mid race to achieve success. Agile methodologies offer a collaborative and flexible approach by supporting small lightweight releases that are ideal for testing a business case or theory with real users. The benefits of faster development without impacting quality and proven practices that embrace end user expectations and error-free rollouts are gaining interest for banks deploying mobile payments.
Embracing agile development to pilot and roll out innovative services quickly: With no worldwide mobile payments standard, financial institutions need to be flexible and adopt a dynamic approach to software development to ensure they will not find themselves backing a losing horse. Accepting that change is inevitable in the first step, while retaining the flexibility to change horses mid race to achieve success. Agile methodologies offer a collaborative and flexible approach by supporting small lightweight releases that are ideal for testing a business case or theory with real users. The benefits of faster development without impacting quality and proven practices that embrace end user expectations and error-free rollouts are gaining interest for banks deploying mobile payments.
Investing in Open Source will reduce m-payments costs and help to accelerate speed to market: A wide variety of Open Source projects have provided building blocks for many mobile payments apps already and helped to accelerate speed to market as well as to improve efficiency. Instead of spending time on commodity services and functionality, all players can focus on USPs by creating innovative solutions. In addition, it will help organizations to reduce the cost of development, testing effort and stop them from paying licencing costs.Open Source software sits neatly with agile development with proving to reduce the likelihood of quality issues. The standards reduce vendor or technology lock-in, providing the flexibility to change direction easily.
Embedding security testing into the software development lifecycle to build and retain customer confidence: Mobile payment security is potentially the biggest hurdle to consumer adoption. A survey of 2,000 UK consumers in 2013 from Firstsource found that fewer than one in four would use their smartphone for m-payments. The vulnerabilities of different mobile devices, complexity of the supply chain and the battle against fraudsters and hackers present major security challenges for all players in the ecosystem.
To retain customer confidence and brand loyalty building customer confidence among cynical users requires rapid development of best practises and methodologies in security testing. The first step is to develop a secure-by-design, e.g. by using OWASP (industry-led and vendor-neutral initiative). Organizations use the application and static analysis is used to understand the API usage, functionality and how it performs technically. Also analyzed are the network traffic and hardware that reveals what network interfaces. These approaches enable a structured and informed to Dynamic Application Security testing of the mobile application client, server and associated services to be developed.
To retain customer confidence and brand loyalty building customer confidence among cynical users requires rapid development of best practises and methodologies in security testing. The first step is to develop a secure-by-design, e.g. by using OWASP (industry-led and vendor-neutral initiative). Organizations use the application and static analysis is used to understand the API usage, functionality and how it performs technically. Also analyzed are the network traffic and hardware that reveals what network interfaces. These approaches enable a structured and informed to Dynamic Application Security testing of the mobile application client, server and associated services to be developed.
An effective test management strategy will help to launch mobile payments faster, smarter and cheaper: In the fast changing market, companies are challenged to apply an approach that will provide sufficient test coverage of devices, operating systems and network operators enabling them to launch m-payments quickly and within budget. The most effective approaches are testing earlier in the development cycle and using both test tools, agile methodology, open source approach and automation frameworks.Spending time on test management will help you to create a multi-channel strategy embracing quality assurance, risk based plan and a systematic approach to improve efficiency. Pragmatic test management also plays a key part in adopting dynamic and agile strategy with embed Open Source approach, helping organisations increase efficiency and to accelerate speed to market.
Summary
Led by the sharp rise in the number of mobile subscribers globally, and the high volume of smartphone sales, mobile payments are expected to exceed $721.4 billion (£435.2 billion) by 2017. According to industry analyst firm Gartner, money transfers, merchandise purchases and bill payments will be key services demanded by consumers.
Led by the sharp rise in the number of mobile subscribers globally, and the high volume of smartphone sales, mobile payments are expected to exceed $721.4 billion (£435.2 billion) by 2017. According to industry analyst firm Gartner, money transfers, merchandise purchases and bill payments will be key services demanded by consumers.
While gaining a share of this multi-billion dollar opportunity is highly attractive, banks that are unwilling or unable to adapt their IT systems quickly are at risk of losing out to other financial services providers. Both established players and start-ups with newer infrastructure and processes in place will be the initial winners in the mobile payments. To overcome a myriad of complex challenges, implementing approaches such as agile, open source, test automation and security testing is imperative to remain competitive and effective.
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