Financial services company
Banking organization helps ensure compliant, high-quality services with application performance testing from OpenText™ LoadRunner™ Enterprise
About the financial services company
Summary
Challenges
- Deliver high-quality digital banking services while ensuring regulatory compliance.
- Meet demanding service-level agreements for delivering open banking data to financial services staff.
Solution
- Deployed effective application testing at enterprise scale.
- Leveraged agile frameworks to enhance service delivery.
- Shifted left to accelerate the testing pipeline.
Results
Completed 1,800 application tests a year
Gained a 360-degree view of application performance
Promoted standardization and best practices
Challenges
- Support high-quality digital banking services for millions of customers
- Test over 1,000 business applications across a wide range of protocols
- Meet demanding service-level agreements for access to open banking
- Comply with a fast-changing and increasingly stringent regulatory landscape
This multinational financial services company offers retail, private, and corporate banking services to millions of customers across Europe. In addition to its digital channels, the financial services firm offers its services through an extensive network of brick-and-mortar branches.
As a leader in retail banking, the customer experience is at the top of the company’s agenda. A spokesperson for the testing team at the financial services company said, “We operate in a highly competitive and regulated industry. To maintain our leading position, it’s crucial we equip the business with the efficient, secure, and high-performing apps they need to deliver outstanding customer service.”
Given modern approaches around open banking in the European Union (EU), always-on application access is an important goal for the company. The spokesperson elaborated, “When open banking came into force, we entered into robust service-level agreements [SLAs] with a variety of stakeholders, including fintechs, insurance companies, and challenger banks. If we can’t deliver open banking data to our partners within these SLAs, we run the risk of losing revenue.”
The regulatory environment in the EU is set to become more stringent still. By early 2025, the company must also comply with the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), which aims to strengthen the IT security of financial services businesses and improve their resilience in disaster scenarios.
“Because of the nature of our business, application performance testing is a crucial capability,” continued the spokesperson. “We use around 1,000 applications across the business, from enterprise systems like SAP® to custom-development software. To ensure compliance and mitigate business risk, we need to verify that our systems are resilient, reliable, and available.”
With LoadRunner Enterprise, we can keep track of all tests and results and deliver fast access to this data during audits.
Solution
For more than 10 years, this leading financial services company has relied on OpenText™ LoadRunner™ Enterprise to deliver effective performance testing across all its protocols and application environments.
Products deployed
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OpenText™ LoadRunner™ Enterprise
Our performance testing software lets development teams across the globe share load testing resources
Services provided
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OpenText™ Professional Services
Get a trusted partner to guide your Information Management path
Deploying effective application testing at enterprise scale
The company originally selected LoadRunner Enterprise for its speed, security, and scalability—and the solution continues to be the organization’s platform of choice for performance testing.
“When we first evaluated the OpenText solution, one of the key capabilities that stood out was its fine-grained security and access controls,” explained the spokesperson. “We work with real-world data in our performance testing environment, which means we need to apply tight controls in line with the EU General Data Protection Regulation [GDPR] and our internal compliance frameworks. The ability to control user access is a must, as is maintaining a full audit trail of every testing activity. With LoadRunner Enterprise, we can keep track of all tests and results and deliver fast access to this data during audits.”
On-premises deployment was also a key requirement for the business. The spokesperson continued, “At the time, the cloud was not an option for us, so we needed an on-premises solution. Even though we are testing at a large scale, we don’t need a big IT infrastructure to support LoadRunner Enterprise; the solution is highly cost-effective.”
Leveraging agile frameworks to enhance service delivery
Over the years, the company has evolved its approach to testing with LoadRunner Enterprise. Initially, the company’s testing teams leveraged the agile methodology, but have since adopted the scaled agile framework (SAFe) framework to support the delivery of testing services to the business.
The spokesperson confirmed, “We’ve shifted from a project-based structure to a more autonomous, cross-functional approach. Adapting the SAFe model, we’ve reorganized our Solution Centers into tribes and chapters—enabling our testing experts to better serve the needs of a large community of stakeholders across the business. In addition, leaders of Quality and Testing across the IT departments are sharing their knowledges and practices inside a new IS Filière Testing Guild.”
Shifting left to accelerate the testing pipeline
Another key reason for the longevity of LoadRunner Enterprise at the company is its strong relationship with OpenText. The company regularly participates in the OpenText Product Advisory Council, empowering it to share feedback and insights directly with OpenText product management teams and actively contribute to the solution development roadmap.
“This year, we are stepping up our collaboration with OpenText Professional Services to help implement our shift-left strategy for performance testing,” commented the spokesperson. “We have already enabled greater scale-out capacity by migrating some of our testing infrastructure to a containerized environment on the cloud, and we are now rolling out OpenText LoadRunner Developer to help our teams accelerate the testing pipeline.”
One of the best things about working with OpenText is that they are always willing to listen; many of the ideas we’ve suggested during Product Advisory Council sessions have gone on to become features of LoadRunner Enterprise.
Results
Today, the financial services company leverages LoadRunner Enterprise to perform around 1,800 large-scale application tests a year—helping the business to ensure that its mission-critical digital systems run smoothly round the clock.
Completed 1,800 application tests a year
For more than a decade, LoadRunner Enterprise has been integral to the company’s approach to application testing. Using Virtual User Generator (VuGen), the company’s testing teams create scripts that emulate real-world user behavior, executed at scale with LoadRunner Enterprise. VuGen functionality makes it fast and easy to create action scripts across one or more protocols that can be re-used by others in the organization, saving time and effort.
“On average, we run around 150 tests a month,” said the spokesperson. “Because the customer experience is a key priority for us, our testing efforts are heavily oriented towards web protocols. We test using around 5,000 virtual users to make sure that our key digital channels can perform smoothly during periods of peak customer demand.”
Gained a 360-degree view of application performance
To help ensure compliance with stringent SLAs, the company continuously analyzes its application performance to identify and address potential issues.
The spokesperson added, “We use a wide range of observability, monitoring, and analytics tools to support our work. LoadRunner Analysis is one of the key tools in our monitoring workflow, as it provides graphs and reports that help us to visualize and interpret data on system performance after a test run. By feeding all these data sources into Grafana dashboards, we get a 360-degree view of application dynamics, which helps us get ahead of potential problems.”
Promoted standardization and best practices
Looking ahead, the company plans to use its DORA compliance efforts as a lever to improve its internal focus on software quality. The objective is to equip teams with the tools, capabilities, and workflows to help deliver both secure and high-quality software.
“Security by design is already at the heart of everything we do, and going forward we want quality by design to be just as deeply embedded in our practices,” said the spokesperson. “DORA reminds us that performance and resilience are no longer just options, but can be vital for achieving compliance. Our work with OpenText Professional Services to roll out LoadRunner Developer will be a key enabler of the quality-by-design approach. By giving our teams performance tests that are integrated, controlled, managed, and backed by support from our team and from OpenText, we can promote greater standardization and best practices in application testing.”
The spokesperson concluded, “One of the best things about working with OpenText is that they are always willing to listen; many of the ideas we’ve suggested during Product Advisory Council sessions have gone on to become features of LoadRunner Enterprise. We are also accompanied and advised by our CSM [Customer Success Manager] and pre-sales experts from OpenText. The solution is getting better all the time, and we see that it will only become more important to our approach to testing in the future.”
