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Improving the Agility of Legacy Payment Systems
Improving the Agility of Legacy Payment Systems
December 10, 2024
As digital payments continue to increase rapidly across all geographies and industry segments, many financial institutions find that growth and innovation are constrained by the limitations of legacy payment systems.
While these systems still serve as the backbone of the payment industry, doing much of the heavy lifting and efficiently processing billions of transactions every day, it is their lack of flexibility and agility that is now impeding many organizations from effectively dealing with the new challenges presented by the rapidly evolving marketplace.
Today, consumers and businesses alike increasingly value speed, convenience, and security. Payment industry participants who still rely primarily on inflexible legacy systems face growing challenges in several key areas, such as maintaining legal and regulatory compliance, effectively detecting and preventing fraud, as well as delivering the innovative new products and services the digital economy is now demanding.
The key question today is how can we continue to leverage the strengths and capabilities that these backbone systems offer, while at the same time improving the efficiency and agility of the technology to better meet the demands of the modern payments industry?
This crossroads has raised questions about how those within the payments industry can adapt and upgrade their systems to remain competitive and better meet customer expectations.
“Outdated processes or legacy systems hinder the adoption of automated testing. Teams already accustomed to manual testing are often resistant to change.”
- Codacy, Exploring the 2024 State of Software Quality Report
Why Agility is More Important Than Ever
Today, payment system agility is more than just a competitive advantage - speed and flexibility are vitally important in the ongoing quest to satisfy ever-evolving customer expectations, address growing security threats, and respond to increasing legal and regulatory requirements.
Consumers now demand instant, always-available payment services, along with seamless omnichannel experiences. Fraudsters are more sophisticated and aggressive than ever, often well ahead of the payment industry in their use of the latest technology, while well-meaning regulators continue to layer on rules and restrictions that further burden systems that are already taxed to their limit.
Most legacy systems, often conceived and constructed decades ago, simply weren’t designed or built to deliver the level of speed and agility required to be competitive in the dynamic payment industry that exists today.
Industry participants who have not found ways to improve operational efficiency risk are at risk of losing both market share and relevancy.
“Objectives such as improved customer experience, risk reduction, increased QA efficiency, and reduced testing effort drive automation in quality. While quality automation is certainly on the rise, organizations still face critical challenges. An average of 27% report challenges related to dealing with legacy systems and the fast-changing application landscape.”
- Capgemini, World Quality Report, 2023-24
Don’t Let the Past Hold You Back
It is important to recognize and address any legacy system related challenges that prevent your organization from taking full advantage of new opportunities generated by the continued growth of digital payments.
Here are a few areas that can be especially difficult to manage:
1. Expertise is Becoming Increasingly Difficult to Find
Many legacy payment systems rely on technology, programming languages, and operational processes that are now outdated. With experienced professionals retiring, organizations are finding it increasingly challenging to find resources who can maintain and upgrade these systems, leading to operational delays and higher maintenance costs.
2. Customers Expect More From Payments
Modern consumers increasingly demand seamless, instant payment experiences, anytime and anywhere they want to transact. However, the overhead of updating and testing legacy systems can often fail to detect or address defects before they trigger negative customer satisfaction issues, causing consumers to lose trust and putting the company's reputation and brand at risk.
3. The Marketplace Requires Speed and Agility
Many legacy systems still rely heavily on manual testing processes, which are time-consuming and prone to error - slowing down projects, restricting innovation, and making it difficult to introduce new products and services on time and on budget.
Introducing testing automation to complement and enhance legacy system processes can significantly expand test coverage, improve accuracy, and boost productivity - allowing your resources to focus on more strategic activities.
How Modern Testing Tools Improve the Agility of Legacy Payment Systems
Implementing modern payment testing tools can offer numerous benefits to help your organization enhance agility and keep pace with industry advancements.
With the right tools in place, the burden of dealing with legacy systems can be eased by streamlining and optimizing testing operations. Key advantages include:
- Automation: Automated testing is a game-changer in payment processing. By aggressively leveraging automation, organizations can speed up project delivery cycles, expand test coverage, and improve quality. Automation also enables continuous testing, ensuring that systems remain reliable as new updates and payment methods are introduced.
- Accessibility: Modern testing tools make your testing processes accessible and user-friendly. By moving testing assets into the cloud, your resources can access the test environment 24/7 from wherever they are based. This level of access improves communication and coordination across the organization and makes it easier to attract and acquire the most skilled resources.
- Accurate Test Data: High-quality, accurate test data is essential to achieve consistent, reliable, and accurate results. Modern testing tools, like Web FASTest offer improved data management capabilities that enhance collaboration, increase accuracy, and provide better operational visibility for stakeholders across the organization.
How Paragon Can Help Improve Your Payment Testing Operations
At Paragon Application Systems, our mission is to simplify and streamline the payment testing process. Our modern, server-based solution, Web FASTest, is designed to meet the unique demands of the payment industry, helping participants to improve testing speed, efficiency, and accuracy.
Paragon’s testing solutions provide a range of features tailored to ensure that financial institutions, payment processors, networks, retailers, and all other payment industry participants remain agile and responsive.
From our commitment to delivering timely, reliable test data and providing tools designed to support 24/7 testing environments, we aim to maximize the return on your testing investment - improving the availability, reliability, and security of your payment systems.
If you’re interested in elevating your organization's payment testing operations to support and enhance the capabilities of all your mission-critical systems, contact us today. Our team of experts is ready to help you achieve your testing goals and secure your competitive advantage.
Included In This Story
Paragon Application Systems
Paragon ATM simulation tools provide the features, functions and flexible automation options so that you can run more tests in less time - improving quality, shortening delivery cycles, reducing costs, fostering collaboration, and increasing channel profitability.
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