Cards for corporates: Are banks doing enough to innovate? Why user experience is still nascent?

Globalization is rapidly increasing and connecting the world economies as one. This growth has led to an increase in global business travellers like never before. To ease expense management for companies and add convenience to business travellers, corporate cards were introduced. Employees no longer have to spend out of their pockets for official expenses and wait endlessly for reimbursement. Corporate cards offer the freedom to handle authorized business expenses and allow employees to deal with official expenditures directly from the company’s account.

For corporate cards to work effectively, it requires a strong testing process to support the software development activity. Since the process involves sensitive data like money, card number, customer details, and company details, there is no scope for compromise on the quality of testing. Card testing is a critical process that needs to be carried out accurately and securely while maintaining all compliance.

Are banks doing enough to innovate card payments?

Banks have seen a transformative change in terms of card innovation. The increasing competition between fintech and other financial institutions has led to innovation in the banking sector. This came as a plan to attract new customers and retain the existing ones.

The payments are getting more flexible, encrypted, regulated, and secured which is making them increasingly ubiquitous and transforming the customer experience. The trend of payments is moving towards real-time transactions and utilizing advanced technologies like Cloud, AI, ML, and digital payments.

The recent innovations in banking/ finance:

Emphasis on a digital approach
Supporting e-channels, e-wallets, and third-party providers
Real-time payment options
Geography-specific needs to be catered
World language supported
AI and machine learning integrated transformations
Approach to embrace the flexible Fintech business models

Even with the growing innovation, some unaddressed challenges by the banks/ financial institutions hinder their growth; they include:

Increasing competition by the fintech companies
Investigate peer-to-peer lending option
Noncard lending options
Unmet consumer demands
Lack of personalization in customer engagement
Slower adoption of new technology

The banking process aims to streamline and address all the challenges that lie ahead of a better user experience.

Why user experience is still nascent?

Today’s disruptive technology has made enormous changes in the way we use cards. Cards have evolved over the years; starting with the introduction of money withdrawal at the ATMs, swiping at merchant machines, and using it for online payments. Further, the introduction of corporate credit cards had been a big hit, offering ease of expense management among the companies.

Even with the greater options and flexibility, the corporate cards offer, the user experience remains nascent. The reason user experience has not seen steep growth is due to the lack of brand awareness, not meeting customer demands, and not using cutting-edge technology.

Scope for improvements in corporate cards

Corporate cards are primarily used by companies for expense management, but it is important for employees also to keep a track of their expenditures and check if they are spending within the specified limit. Such tracking needs a real-time, efficient app that works flawlessly to update the debits instantly, send notifications, and track the daily/weekly/monthly expenses. The user experience can, further, be enhanced with a responsive user design and efficient navigation system.
A greater customer experience can be achieved with an omnichannel transaction solution. Omnichannel payments refer to the mode of payments in multiple ways; for example, making payment using phone, web, merchant machine, or third-party payment apps. Though there has been significant growth in providing omnichannel payments, there is a need to expand the payment options for corporate cards to offer great convenience to users.
To offer a great experience for card users, it is essential to incorporate the right UI UX practices. Only a responsive design and seamless user experience will keep the users happy and eventually help to retain them.
Credit card budgeting tools are perfect for tracking expenses. These tools connect with the financial accounts and track the transaction through an app. Emphasis should be made on creating credit card budgeting tools with great design and seamless user experience.

Why is card testing critical? What are the parameters involved?

The success of a corporate credit card lies in the accurate credit card testing process conducted during and after the development process. Without proper testing, the process would be chaotic providing inconvenience to the employees and incurring a huge loss to the company. The testing of cards involves various important steps to ensure that it works even under high loads without performance failure.

Key points involved in card testing:

The card should be tested to offer flexibility to work online as well as offline
Card testing ensures that the card works efficiently with the sales machine even during the offline payment
The testing should ensure that the payments are done instantly
It should effortlessly pass the payment confirmation message testing
Testing to check if the funds are properly received in the merchant account
Card testing must ensure that the payment confirmation is received
Testing should make sure that the payments are encrypted and secured

Corporate cards are evolving and transforming business objectives while offering better security and simplifying payment options. Furthermore, the rewards, deals, and perks offered by the card companies are initiatives to attract more business owners, making it benefit mutually.

Since the process involves sensitive data like money, card number, customer details, and company details, the critical development process of card software needs a well-planned, accurate, secure, and strong software testing process.

Why Yethi for credit card testing? Credit card testing is an elaborate process involving functionality validation, functionality testing, non-functional testing, testing the performance, testing the changes and configuration, and reviewing the test reports. Yethi’s 300+ domain specialists have developed test strategies and business scenario/ test case reviews for corporate credit cards, for esteemed clients.

Yethi is a niche QA servicer provider for the global banking and financial companies. Yethi’s flagship product, Tenjin, is diminishing the operational gaps across key business areas of the BFSI industry. This simple plug-in platform is process-driven and offers seamless end-to-end testing. It delivers better software performing at a faster rate with nearly 100% accuracy. Our half-a-million test case repository for card testing comprises end-to-end test case scenarios for credit card payment through POS application and tests the important details of cards like card number, expiry date, CVV number, AVS code, encryption, authorization, and settlement, and more helping you to fast track your product within your budget constraint.