Optimise Your ATM Testing An NCR White Paper

Today’s consumer demands ever-increasing levels of convenience when it comes to financial self-service technology, making the ATM an important interface between a financial institution and its customers. Inside the ATM is a complex set of application functions ranging from remote deposit, security controls, promotional messaging to personalisation.

This complexity will continue as banks focus on optimising lower-value transactions and increasing the ATM channel functionality. According to a recent report by Boston Consulting Group1, customers are “voting with their feet” if convenience and value of service are not provided. Financial institutions that recognise and address this trend and place value on the importance of improving the customer experience at the ATM will find themselves ahead of their competitors. Testing is a critical component in the race to bring ATM applications to market quickly with production-quality reliability. Financial institutions can gain up to 80% in cost and time savings through solid ATM testing, according to ATM Marketplace. A CIO survey produced by Gartner3 also indicated that testing should measure business benefits of the applications being developed through more meaningful testing.

However, many financial institutions’ IT groups are struggling with resource allocation for ATM testing and with driving new functionality to market faster. Cutting corners leads to more costly production outages from code defects. IDC research found that developers often spend 37% of their time debugging and fixing problems4. Besides the developer’s misallocation of time, the financial institution’s reputation and customer loyalty are often impacted. A pragmatic approach to ATM testing practices will address all these issues and ensure improved performance, reliability and usability.