Testing is critical for the entire payment ecosystem, viz., acquirers, processors, issuers, banks, payment processors, payment schemes, and fintechs, to ensure the transaction happens without friction, errors, or high accuracy.

Maintaining standards and compliance requirements for different payment brands across various transaction types is complex. Even for payment brands, the traditional manual approach to overseeing merchant testing for compliance can take time and effort. It extends certification timelines and delays product and terminal launches into the market.

This blog explores the critical need for test automation in the payments space, emphasizing the importance of upholding standards and compliance requirements.

Evolving EMVCo payment standards

As you know, EMVCo develops and manages the EMV specifications to facilitate interoperability and reliability in card-based payments. Its evolving standards cover various aspects, such as

EMV chip specifications includes:

1. EMV Contactless
2. EMV 3-D Secure (3DS)
3. EMV Payment Tokenisation
4. QR code payments

Here’s how automation can help simplify in maintaining your compliance with EMVCo standards:

1. Reliability - Ensures that the same test case scenarios are run the same way every time, reducing human errors and increasing reliability.
2. Faster test execution and continuous integration -Automated testing enables quicker compliance validation across multiple devices, test cases, and scenarios. It also allows direct integration with the CI/CD pipeline.
3. Complete coverage of test cases - Automated testing will cover all your test cases and transaction scenarios which are impractical to test manually.
4. Reduces testing costs - Automated testing lowers costs and improves efficiency. It reduces the need for detailed manual testing by finding issues early. This allows your testers to focus on more complex scenarios that are harder to automate. Finding problems early also decreases the expenses associated with fixing errors after deployment.
5. Scalable platform - Automated test platforms can assist you to scale new test cases as such as those from EMVCo as they evolve. This enables you to do continuous compliance testing as soon as the requirements change.
6. Detailed reporting and analysis - It will provide you detailed reporting with analytics dashboard to monitor your test results and compliance status.

Complexity of Payment Systems

In this section we will dive deeper into all the complexities that goes into payment systems. We'll cover the different parts of payment systems like regulations and challenges.

1. The payment system includes entities like acquirers and issuing banks, schemes like Visa and Mastercard, merchants, vendors that make the terminals, switch providers and consumers with different needs.
2. From the terminals you see at stores to the secure online gateways,
3. The whole payment ecosystem relies on hardware and software working together and good security like encryption and making sure everything follows PCI-DSS standards.
4. It also has to deal with all the different ways people can pay like cards, digital wallets, transfers and such across places like stores, online, mobile, contactless.
5. And it has challenges like making all the different systems work together and processing transactions at a large scale that's also high performance.

Challenges in implementing the payments test automation

Choosing the right automation test tools

When choosing payment automation test tools, consider the following key factors to ensure that the transaction quality remains intact and provides you with the best payment experience:

1. Targeting quality - The tool should have end-to-end testing that reduces errors by ensuring consistent and accurate test results.
2. Adhere to standards and compliance -Ensure the tools support testing for relevant payment standards like PSD2, EMVCo, PCI DSS, 3DS and standards set by the payment schemes. It also needs to support real-time transaction validation.
3. Ease of use - It should be interoperable and compatible with your existing systems, including older infrastructures and CI/CD pipelines.
4. Real-time transaction validation - It needs to support real-time transaction validation.
5. Scalability and adaptability - It has to support simulating high transaction volume and stress testing. And it needs to be adaptable to changing business needs and how customers behave
6. Ease of integration - It should be interoperable and compatible with your existing systems, including older infrastructures and CI/CD pipelines.
7. Reduced costs and reliability - It should save you money and make things more reliable. Should improve overall quality so that the customers trust you more by giving them a smooth payment experience.

Automated test tools and certification platform for the payment brands

As a payment brand, automating compliance test management with a cloud-based solution streamlines administrative tasks and guarantees consistent adherence to all necessary standards of all your merchants. It will help you rapidly execute comprehensive pre-certification test scenarios, accelerating the certification process and reducing time to market for new payment solutions for your merchants. It will provide consistent and repeatable results, ensuring all stakeholders adhere to compliance and regulatory standards without deviation. 

By implementing automated testing, payment brands can achieve faster certification and deployment, enhancing their ability to meet market demands efficiently.

The future of test automation in payments 

The future of test automation in payments, will focus on AI and ML. AI and ML will help in performing

• Test Case Generation: Artificial intelligence can analyze customer behavior to automatically generate test cases based on the vulnerabilities and custom test case scenarios that we might miss in the traditional testing methods.
• Self-healing testing - Machine learning will help identify the payment test case scenarios by incorporating the changes in the latest payment regulations.
• Predictive analysis - By analyzing test results, artificial intelligence can help you to uncover potential compliance issues proactively, resolving the complex issues faster.

Automated testing provides an excellent means of ensuring secure and compliant payment systems. It confirms all stakeholders adhere to standards and compliance as defined by payments industry guidelines. Integrating automation allows for meeting upcoming demands of the payments industry while delivering an optimized payment experience for customers.

For further insights into automation testing in payments and selecting the right tools do reach out to us at info[at]payhuddle.com