Future will see more digital services at much faster pace: NN Subramanian, Maveric Systems

Maveric Systems helps global banking and fintech leaders drive business agility through effective integration of development, operations and quality engineering initiatives. Its strong banking domain competency combined with expertise across legacy and new age technology landscapes makes us a preferred partner for customers worldwide.

NN Subramanian, Co-Founder and Global Head of Quality Engineering, Maveric Systems, tells us more. Excerpts:

DQ: How is the rise in software testing key to implementing digitisation?

NN Subramanian: The ever increasing digital transformation has led to the sharp rise in software testing. A report by Global Market Insights suggests that the software testing market would reach $60 billion by 2026. Agile and DevOps led testing would be instrumental in this exponential growth curve. Customers would also see technologies such as artificial intelligence led predictive analytics taking centre stage in speeding up testing cycles.

The experience-centric economy is already seeing testing becoming a prominent member of its family. Thorough levels of testing are enforced across smarter devices, websites, wearables and other digital properties, to ensure superior performance, better reliability and utmost security. This means, digital quality engineering is going to be seeing increasing demand for accelerating transformations.

Early digital quality engineering strategies are now the new normal for speeding up the testing process and building an automated pipeline for continuous quality. Pitfalls and defects are detected much earlier in the software development life cycle with agile resolution and re-factoring of code.

The post COVID-19 scenarios will definitely be seeing aggressive investments into digital experience and digital adoption, which means more digital services at a much faster pace being launched in the international and domestic markets. This will require quality at speed, and at scale.

DQ: How is innovation needed to adjust to the rapid spike in innovation in the space?

NN Subramanian: New age testing approaches, supported by intelligent test automation is the direction everyone is seeking. With significant Dev-QA integration in emerging QE delivery models now the demand is for in-sprint automated functional and non-functional testing.

Many businesses are still in the early stages of adopting these testing models. Intelligent test automation strategies fuelled with technologies such as AI, ML, RPA and more, would bring significant acceleration, efficiency, productivity, continuous monitoring and scale into QE.

About 95% quality engineering (QE) automation is one of the key promises delivered by Maveric to its customers. We have invested and built zero code-based tools and accelerators and matured frameworks, which are engineered for speed with cognitive methods and predictive analytics.

DQ: How will banking, as a core and essential services sector, evolve in the current scenario?

NN Subramanian: The world economy is going through one of the most epic battles with COVID19. What new models emerge and how businesses cope with the new-normal, we will know only when the dust settles down and we come out of the current crisis. While this scenario has come with many challenges, this will undoubtedly give birth to many opportunities, especially for enterprising Indian Businesses.

Digital transformation market in the banking world is estimated to reach 121.7B by 2025. With the pandemic, this might see a steep rise and change starting from the current year itself. You will see many traditional banking service providers who were not digital savvy, would soon adopt the digital path for their survival.

For example, I recently resolved a query on my bank account through a chatbot which wasn’t available in my bank before the lockdown. Many smaller service firms are even using opensource chat platforms such as WhatsApp for communicating with their customers.

Look at Maveric Systems, for instance. We were ready with the remote home working structure in less than 24 hours after the lockdown. The work from home (WFH) model has also been effectively implemented by schools, Universities, physical fitness centres, health-care consulting and others for their service continuity. Online media entertainment platforms are seeing a significant spike in its customer viewership. Payment wallets are acting as saviours if you are struggling with cash.

As you see, digital consumption is about to grow exponentially and that would require the IT service providers and product providers to rise and deliver at Speed and scale.

DQ: In what way does Maveric’s Quality Engineering (QE) services accelerate banking transformation?

NN Subramanian: We are a world-class leader in quality engineering (QE) services for the banking industry. In the last 20 years, we have supported more than 60 banking transformations. It is a testimony of our exclusive banking domain experience.

We bring continuous quality focus across transformation journey’s, with quality engineering (QE) solutions that are engineered for speed and can be delivered at scale. Using our cutting-edge dev-test-ops approach and real time insight driven dashboards, we uniquely anticipate pitfalls and defects much earlier in the development cycles.

Maveric’s clientele include banking customers of all ages such as traditional full-service banks or the new-age challenger and digital banks. We have supported many unique customer engagements – be it a multi-year or multi-country transformation or a new banking product rollout assurance or new age digital initiatives or compliance led validations and more. This way, we have built diverse banking experience with multiple specializations across the segments of corporate banking, retail banking, payments, wealth etc. Furthermore, we have also built IPs such as ready-to-deploy test kits, tools, accelerators and frameworks for faster time to market.

DQ: How will banking in India, and globally, evolve, post Covid-19?

NN Subramanian: The banking scenario both globally and in India will drastically shift to ‘Digital First’ and ‘Mobile only’ banking channels. As we come to terms with this new normal, I believe the industry will focus on:

Localization – more and more banks will now tend to hyper localize the products and services
Digital payments – it’s anybody’s guess that digital payments will see a exponential rise in transactions.
Faster go to market - Banks will also focus more on agile ‘launch as you develop’ development model to bring newer and better services to its customers.

What we are going through is unprecedented. Banks will be and should be driving successful banking technology transformation through conscious contextualization, leveraging comprehensive competencies and with core commitment to delivering superior customer experiences.