Quality Engineering: The Key to Successful Digital Transformation in 2025

In 2025, the financial services landscape will continue to evolve faster than ever thanks to new technologies, the growing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI), and heightened customer expectations. As traditional banks compete with digital-first disruptors and face regulatory deadlines like ISO 20022, successful digital transformation is critical.

This toolkit is designed to help banks and financial institutions navigate these challenges with confidence, leveraging Quality Engineering (QE) to ensure seamless delivery, resilience, and exceptional customer experiences. 

Why Digital Transformations Fail and How to Succeed

McKinsey famously reports that 70% of all digital transformation projects fail. The reasons for failure are often attributed to poor planning, underestimated risks, and a lack of quality assurance. An unsuccessful digital transformation, or one that doesn't deliver the expected results, can lead to significant financial losses, delays, and reputational damage.

By embedding Quality Engineering (QE) into every stage of the project lifecycle, financial institutions can dramatically improve their chances of success.

Quality Engineering helps identify potential issues early, proactively manage risks, and align outcomes with customer needs. By integrating QE from the outset, organisations ensure that quality becomes a strategic priority rather than an afterthought, ultimately leading to smoother and more effective transformations.

Accelerating Transformation with Automation

The rapid pace of change in banking necessitates a move away from manual testing and processes. Automation plays a critical role in accelerating delivery, reducing errors, and maintaining consistency across systems. For example, a UK bank partnered with us to implement Dynamics 365 automation, resulting in a 40% reduction in testing timelines. This transformation enabled them to deliver critical system updates and enhancements significantly faster, improving overall efficiency and service delivery. Automation frameworks are also highly adaptable, scaling efficiently to meet the needs of large, complex projects. By streamlining repetitive tasks, automation frees up valuable resources for strategic activities, such as innovation and customer-focused initiatives. Introducing automated regression testing further ensures that updates are validated quickly, maintaining system integrity and operational continuity without disrupting functionalities.

Building Resilience into Banking Systems

Today, resilience is essential for maintaining trust and operational continuity. Even a brief system outage can result in significant financial and reputational damage. In 2024, several high-profile outages underlined this issue. Barclays experienced a system failure that disrupted payments for millions of customers, causing widespread frustration and delays. Similarly, NatWest faced a significant outage that affected online banking services, leaving millions of customers unable to access their accounts or make transactions.

These incidents depict just how importance resilient systems are to banks. With a robust approach to Quality Engineering banks are able to simulate high-demand scenarios through stress testing, conduct disaster recovery tests to prepare for unexpected failures, and leverage data-driven insights to predict and prevent any potential issues. Ensuring resilience involves rigorous testing under real-world conditions, allowing organisations to mitigate risks effectively and safeguard their operations against future disruptions.

ISO 20022 Compliance Made Easy

The approaching ISO 20022 compliance deadline presents a major challenge for financial institutions, with less than 300 days remaining to achieve readiness. Non-compliance can lead to regulatory penalties, operational disruptions, and potentially being shut out of the cross border payments space. The ISO 20022 migration process starts with understanding your current position, and our ISO 20022 Readiness Assessment provides the clarity needed to establish whether you are ready to begin testing across all environments.

This assessment evaluates your tools, systems, and processes to identify potential gaps and risks. It also includes a high-level review of your testing environments to ensure they meet ISO 20022 requirements, as well as an evaluation of your organisation’s Quality Engineering maturity to pinpoint areas for improvement.

The output is a customised roadmap designed to help you achieve compliance while maintaining operational resilience. By embedding Quality Engineering practices, this assessment ensures you are prepared to begin ISO 20022 testing with confidence, avoiding costly setbacks or surprises, allowing you to meet the November 2025 deadline for compliance.

Enhancing Customer Experience Through Quality

Customer expectations in the financial sector are higher than ever, and a seamless digital experience can be the difference between retaining and losing a customer.

According to a survey we conducted last year, a third of UK customers experienced technical failures with their banks, and nearly one in three stated they would consider switching banks as a result. This outlines the critical need for robust systems that deliver consistently exceptional experiences.

Quality Engineering plays a pivotal role in improving customer satisfaction by eliminating errors through rigorous end-to-end testing, ensuring systems operate smoothly across all devices and platforms, and building trust through secure and reliable services. By mapping customer journeys, banks can identify critical touchpoints and prioritise their testing efforts, ensuring that every interaction meets or exceeds expectations.

Looking ahead...

Digital transformation is a critical priority for banks in 2025, driven by the need to meet evolving customer expectations and remain competitive in an increasingly digital-first landscape. By integrating Quality Engineering into their operations, financial institutions can streamline their transformation journeys, ensuring resilience, compliance, and enhanced customer satisfaction.

If you'd like to know more about how our Quality Engineers could help ensure your next important digital transformation project goes smoothly, reach out to us at ask@roq.co.uk or contact us here.