The correct generation and printing of documents are critical elements of the functioning of every financial institution. In the era of digitalization, testing their accuracy has become particularly important, especially with respect to the regulations of the European Union and the Polish Financial Supervision Authority. Consumer rights enforced by these institutions mean that any errors, such as in loan agreements, may result in significant costs for the bank.
Each such document contains many critical elements, such as contract terms, rules, regulations, consumer obligations and rights, procedures, and complaint conditions, which are usually consistent for a given type of document, along with a range of dynamic information, such as APR, commissions, loan amounts, or installments. Additionally, there may be extra information regarding insurance or premiums.
If these important elements of the contract contain errors or key provisions are missing, the customer has the right to submit a complaint, such as a sanction for a free loan under a cash loan. In this situation, the customer is entitled to a refund of the total commission and all interest from the bank, which often amounts to tens of thousands in refunds. The bank has the option to take the case to court instead of issuing a refund, but there are also significant costs associated with the trial, and, furthermore, the outcome of the case is uncertain.
Manual testing of such documents is a challenging and time-consuming operation. It requires a thorough understanding of the entire process and meticulous reading and verification of often several, or even several dozen, pages of the document multiple times, across different types of documents and various variants.
Considering that these tests must be performed every time changes are made to the system, this requires a significant number of man-days. As a result, many companies opt for targeted testing, focusing on areas where major changes have been introduced or where errors are anticipated based on past occurrences.
The solution to the challenges of testing bank documents and printouts is automation. Smartware tools are designed not only for automating the testing of business paths and processes in financial institutions but also for testing PDF printouts generated by the system.
Using these tools, we can verify the correctness of documents both formally and substantively—ensuring they contain all the correct data and records they should. With the automation of this process, we can test a large volume of documents in many different variants, even after every minor change, and as frequently as every day if necessary.
As a result, a significant portion of the workload is automated, allowing testers to focus on selectively verifying particularly important issues, as well as analyzing and handling errors.
The entire process of automatic testing of bank printouts begins with document templates defined by business analysts, based on legal acts and other regulations, including internal ones. The template contains static content, which is consistent for a given document type, as well as dynamically inserted values that are generated during the process.
At this stage, it is important to establish a document standard to ensure the consistency and transparency of subsequent templates, which also facilitates testing automation. Smartware provides its clients with support at this initial stage, offering basic templates and assisting with their implementation.
Next, the development team modifies the software so that the final printout matches the template, and the testing team prepares automatic test modules.
In the following step, we run tests as part of regression, functional, automatic, and environmental monitoring.
The entire test suite can be executed whenever there is a need to test any business process that includes printing. Additionally, it is possible to run tests of generated documents on a case-by-case basis, as needed.
As a result of the entire process, we receive a report containing:
A detailed report is then sent to testers and business departments for further analysis.
By automating the testing of bank printouts, we can reduce the number of errors detected in production by as much as 80-90%, while significantly speeding up the entire process and substantially reducing costs.
Moreover, with manual testing of generated documents, financial institutions can typically only test about 10-20% within 30-40 man-days due to the time-consuming nature of this process. In contrast, automated tests cover 90% to 100% of the documents, while reducing the workload to 10-20 man-days.
At the same time, the time to market is shortened, the risk of problems is reduced, and the costs of correcting errors are minimized due to their earlier detection.
The challenges associated with automating bank document and printout tests revolve around two main topics:
We have expanded the entire Smartware ecosystem of automated testing tools with frameworks that allow the addition of a component to each tested business path to check the printouts generated as part of these processes.
Creating, running, and reporting such tests are fully integrated within the Smartware ecosystem. Automated bank print tests are included in the automatic error reporting system, and manual testers and business employees can easily run them independently.
Additionally, we continuously develop our tools based on accumulated experience, extending our solutions to new areas and environments where the processes, tools, or document formats may differ.
We are evolving the initially static, algorithmic methods of verifying generated bank documents to increasingly leverage artificial intelligence. This ensures deeper and more accurate verification not only of entries and dynamic values but also of overall readability, images, and other visual elements.
Automation of testing the documents generated by banking systems offers numerous benefits to financial institutions, leading to significant savings and risk minimization. Any institution that wants to efficiently verify the accuracy of printouts today—and especially in the future—needs such a solution.
To avoid pitfalls and effectively address any challenges related to this process, it is advisable to seek professional support and leverage the experience of the Smartware team. Contact us to learn more.
