APIs are driving the financial services industry today. The financial services industry embraced online banking; however, the pace of digital innovation has been sluggish till now. APIs are helping the financial space drive up the pace of innovation.

Some of the critical functions that APIs help perform:

• Make siloed systems talk to each other
• Improve development productivity by quickly assembling services to create sophisticated products
• Offer financial data open services, ready to be incorporated as the framework in apps, and front office tools

Given the importance of APIs in the current financial ecosystem, it is utterly useless if they cannot be relied upon. Thus, testing to validate them is vital before they can be rolled out.

APIs are commonly used by the banking, non-banking financial services, payment schemes, and fintech apps.

In this blog, we will focus on the functional testing of web service APIs.

Functional testing of APIs

This is all about testing a specific set of functions within the codebase. These functions represent particular scenarios to ensure that the API functions within expected parameters while handling the errors when the results are outside of the expected parameters.

How do you go about doing the API testing?

1. Create API testing requirements – purpose, target customer, workflow, features & functions, other API interactions, what is being tested, testing priorities, expected output, and definition of pass and fail
2. Test environment setup – configuration of servers, databases, and API interactions
3. Test framework development – use standard tools or custom-built tools for the framework
4. API test cases – coding of test scenarios, creating sanity check test suites, and surveillance test suites
5. Test execution and reporting

How do we go about doing it?

Most form factors that are used in digital payments come as APIs – be it QR codes, SRC, or platforms like UPI. When it is implemented by banks, merchants, and fintech app developers, they must get it certified by various payment schemes. They need to go through a process of testing, validation, and certification before they start to perform transactions.

We have built a test platform that can be used by payment schemes, banks, non-banking financial service organizations, and fintech app providers to perform API testing.

The entire process of API testing can be enabled on the platform within 48 hours to a week. All you have to do is write up the test cases based on the business process, customer’s API specifications, and workflow, and define the validation library.

Attributes of our API testing tool

Our platform simulates the functional and workflow scenarios. It also simulates the mobile and web modules in iOS and Android that sends the API requests, and the response logs are automatically captured and validated. Then the tool figures if the test results are pass or fail.

The entire process of triggering transactions to capturing the response logs to validating the testing criteria is fully automated.

It can be used for debug testing before you go for the certification and type approval testing (certification).