200% ROI within 12 months: A Shawbrook Bank Success Story

Developing new banking products quickly while offering best-in-class service is difficult for most banks in the UK, given there’s no dearth of competitors and there’s a surge in demanding customers. Needless to say, banks have to struggle harder to retain their customer base in the UK.

One Yobota survey revealed that 77% of UK banks and financial services firms surveyed began to engage with new customer segments in recent years. Moreover, 80% of them were regularly seeking feedback from customers, and 71% were already implementing them by introducing new products. While many others are focused on modernizing their digital channels since over 50% of the UK population is expected to use mobile phone banking services by 2026.

Improving the customer experience significantly while introducing new products is even harder for specialist banks with lower budgets, given the higher web application development and testing costs. This case report highlights how Shawbrook Bank, despite lower budgets and higher development and technological costs, managed to improve the customer experience significantly. Let’s get right into it.

The Challenge
Every bank’s success story for digitization begins with a challenge, usually web application development. But for this bank, it was testing.

When this UK bank began developing new digital banking features to woo its existing customers, they were faced with the following challenges:

1. Inefficient testing
   They had a hard time validating the customer experience across various browsers. Since the bank did not have parallel testing measures in place post-web application development, they were wasting over 2500+ person days and significant funds to simply validate changes and test their product.
2. High tester turnover
   The tester turnover was unbearably high, presumably due to redundant and inefficient testing processes, leading to poor maintenance of the testing ecosystem. At one point, the bank was spending over $400,000 solely on testing.
3. Poor customer experience
   Given the inefficient testing practices and high tester turnover, validation efforts were delayed. So, the bank had to release the software to production prematurely. This, in turn, meant that customers were at the receiving end of a buggy software experience.
   
   To put an end to all these problems, the bank decided to automate testing and accelerate the software development and feedback times. And for that, they turned to Quinnox for help. In the next section of this case report, we go over how the UK bank solved its software testing problems with Qyrus.

The Solution
Quinnox used Qyrus, its proprietary AI-powered automation platform, to implement a shift-left quality strategy, through which the specialist bank was able to release software updates quickly without compromising the stability of business processes. Here’s how.

1. Automated tests
   The Qyrus team successfully automated a range of tests for the bank’s software through CI/CD pipeline integrations and Qyrus-native plugins and streamlined crucial processes like savings account activities, customer due diligence, and customer onboarding in its savings applications, lending applications, and customer apps.
   
   Through Qyrus CI/CD automation, tests were executed immediately after the build, increasing testing efficiency. X-ray was used for test management and reporting was simplified as well, given reports got added directly to the pipeline.
   
   Such automation lowered the number of hours spent by the UK bank’s testing team and reduced the number of manual errors dramatically. For perspective, such automation prevented the release of over 2500+ bugs into production.
2. Repurposed functional tests for performance testing
   To reduce the testing time, the bank repurposed functional tests for performance testing with Qyrus. They executed tests for over 1000+ users simultaneously, increasing test reusability and improving testing efficiency. Furthermore, thanks to repurposing tests, they were able to ensure greater consistency and run reliable tests, given there was no scope for introducing errors manually.
   
   This meant that their savings applications, lending applications, and customer-facing applications were bug-free.
3. Scalable infrastructure and coverage
   With Qyrus’ help, the bank was also able to expand its test coverage across multiple platforms, browsers, devices, and operating systems, quickly. This ensured the bank’s customers had a consistent user experience across platforms, no matter which platform they used, savings applications, lending applications, or others.

The Impact
The Shawbrook Bank success story is an excellent example of how companies can follow through with their promise of providing its customers the best experience possible, with better testing.

After all, with Qyrus’ AI-based testing automation platform, the UK bank was able to streamline testing considerably.

For the purpose of this case report, it translated to:

“Quinnox is a key partner of ours, not only supporting our technology delivery teams but also with tools like Qyrus. Test automation is a critical capability for any engineering team, and Qyrus supports the testing of our web, API, and mobile components as a part of our CI/CD processes, and also in ongoing regression testing across our partner ecosystem. The real power of Qyrus is that we have this extremely broad testing capability in one tool, run in the Cloud, and reusable across all our development teams.” – Russ Thornton, CTO, Shawbrook Bank

Authors

Qyrus