Data-driven testing enables bank to slash costs by 20% during COVID-19

While COVID-19 crippled testing for some banks, one RedCompass Labs client in London benefited from the implementation of a revolutionary data-driven payments testing solution, enabling them to slash systems testing costs by 20% and continue testing at pace while working remotely. This initiative is part of an ongoing programme by Mizuho Bank to leverage innovative technology that reduces cost, builds resilience and enables right-sized, blended onsite, near-shore and off-shore teams to deliver transformation across its global operations.

The Quality Assurance-as-a-Service (QAaaS) solution, developed by RedCompass Labs, a specialist banking consultancy, combines QA expertise and big-data analytics tools to amplify the bank’s testing capacity dramatically. By cleansing and comparing production file data, it drastically cuts the time and number of people required for testing, increasing coverage, and significantly improving quality.

“Traditional manual and automated testing solutions are slow, prone to human error, resource-intensive and costly to maintain,” said Ed Pask, Senior Partner at RedCompass Labs. “Leveraging our 18-years of specialised payments testing experience and our cutting-edge data analytics expertise, we have reimagined Quality Assurance to address all of these shortcomings”.

Bucking industry trends caused by current COVID-19 restrictions, last month Mizuho and RedCompass Labs successfully accelerated cost-saving and automated deployment tooling. Under the UK Government’s restrictions of working from home, the consultancy was able to remotely deploy an upgraded version of the data analysis tool, via RedCompass Labs’ team in Poland. This upgrade enabled the bank’s team and RedCompass Labs consultants to begin remote testing with offsite resources, without any operational impact.

“In the current economic environment where the COVID-19 pandemic is hurting the economy and shutting down offshore traditional testing”, said Tom Hewson, RedCompass Labs Senior Partner, “banks must start to build resilience, reduce cost and increase quality to prevail. RedCompass Labs’ QA as a Service, powered by data analytics, uses anonymised production data to do just that.”

Mizuho integrated the ground-breaking testing solution into their payments test environment in 2019 and has drastically increased its pace of testing since then. Using vast volumes of anonymised production data to validate system changes in near real-time, Mizuho now detects defects (including those impossible to predict edge cases) early in its development cycle. These defects never reach production, where they could negatively impact customers and the bank’s reputation.

“At Mizuho, we act with our clients in mind. We strive to offer value-added payment services that are reliable and resilient. It is key for us that we protect our customers from incidents and defects in the production environment”, explained Christophe Camboly, Managing Director, Head of Europe IT & Operations Department at Mizuho Bank.

Identifying defects as early as possible saves costly rework later in the development cycle, reducing the overall cost and complexity of system development and production changes. Mizuho was able to realise a 20% saving in quality assurance costs on their first project using this technology. The upgraded version implemented last month promises further cost efficiency for future payments projects across Mizuho’s European operations.

“Working in partnership with RedCompass Labs”, continued Camboly, “we have been able to cut costs and drive efficiency across the European payment platform. Having this technology in place is timely as we are now well prepared to efficiently tackle the challenges of the transition to ISO 20022, starting with the Target2 migration in 2021”.