BFSI firms today face intensifying pressure on multiple fronts:
In this context, traditional ROI levers focused solely on cost containment are no longer sufficient. Forward-looking BFSI firms are shifting from reactive optimization to structural reinvention. The next frontier of ROI will be unlocked through automation, agility, and QA embedded holistically across the operating model.
Launching new finance products is often slow and fragmented, spanning six or more siloed department: actuarial, IT, marketing, ops, compliance, and PMO.
This legacy setup favors stability over speed and no longer fits today’s fast-paced, digital-first environment.
The solution: enterprise agility.
Cross-functional teams that own outcomes end-to-end can build and iterate faster. The cultural shift pays off: one Asian insurer saw a 20-point boost in both customer satisfaction and employee engagement within a year of going Agile.
There are four essential shifts for this to happen:
Form cross-functional tribes and squads: Tribes are essentially mission-based groups (e.g., “Product Launch,” “Claims Automation”) that align on customer outcomes. Within each tribe, squads are agile teams accountable for delivery, from pricing and design to execution and iteration.
Delayer the organization and simplify governance: Agile structures reduce middle management layers, minimize shadow committees, and cut alignment overhead. One BFSI company reduced hierarchy from seven layers to three, eliminated 30% of internal committees, and realized a 20% efficiency gain.
Embed agility in operations, not just change initiatives: While tribes drive transformation, self-managing teams run core operations such as claims, sales, and underwriting with full autonomy. Combining operations and customer support into unified squads boosts accountability and reduces handoffs.
Invest in talent and culture early: Agile requires new skills: product thinking, data fluency, and servant leadership. Successful BFSI firms launch leadership learning journeys, upskill roles like product owners and agile coaches, and bring in outside talent to inject new ways of working.
Once your organization has laid the cultural groundwork, the next step is to scale automation systematically, starting with a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Center of Excellence.
This dedicated team drives enterprise-wide intelligent process automation (IPA), turning isolated wins into sustainable ROI.
RPA already delivers impressive results: 60–70% task automation, 30%+ cost efficiencies, and up to 80% processing cost reduction. But to maximize value, companies need to connect RPA with AI, workflow redesign, and business goals, not treat it as a standalone tool.
In BFSI, automation creates impact in:
Claims: FNOL, fraud checks, payout validation
Underwriting: Risk scoring, document collection
Policy service: Chatbots, billing, renewals
Compliance: Reporting, audit trail automation
To scale automation with ROI in mind, follow these six steps:
Align with strategy: clarify how automation supports key outcomes (faster claims, leaner policy ops, or agent support).
Think end-to-end: don’t automate in silos. Redesign journeys like quote-to-bind or claim-to-pay to integrate automation across all functions.
Start small, move fast: launch quick wins with minimal viable automations in weeks. Build momentum through visible impact.
Map the roadmap: prioritize high-volume, rules-based tasks (e.g. billing, claims intake) before expanding into complex flows.
Set up a CoE: use a central team to manage tools, vendors, and bot standards—while execution stays in the business.
Invest in people: train staff in automation, redesign roles, and shift ownership to frontline teams with new agile skills.
As BFSI firms digitize, testing can’t remain manual, fragmented, or reactive.
Testing must accelerate along with digital transformation, and test automation is the first-and-foremost action to achieve that.
To optimize ROI, they must evolve from fragmented, tool-based automation efforts toward a strategic, enterprise-wide approach that embeds quality engineering across the delivery lifecycle.
Legacy test practices (manual execution, siloed scripts, environment bottlenecks) introduce high costs and risks. In contrast, unified test automation drives measurable impact across:
Speed: Faster product launches through parallel execution and CI/CD alignment
Cost: Reduced reliance on manual testers and physical infrastructure
Risk: Early defect detection across integrations and policy scenarios
Scalability: Consistent assurance across lines of business and geographies
For BFSI enterprises to standardize testing across the entire organization, there are four major stages:
BFSI companies should unify test development under shared libraries, frameworks, and automation standards. In a low-code automation testing platform, even non-technical team members can engage in QA. That means even underwriters, product owners, and operations SMEs can co-author business-flow test cases (e.g., claims FNOL to payment, multi-product quote flows) without needing deep technical skills.
Testing must mirror real-world complexity. However, consider the vast number of browser/device/operating systems to be tested on, finance firms face unnecessary dependence on physical machines.
Instead, companies should invest into device farms, known as TestCloud. With thousands of readily available environments, they can schedule and run tests at scale to ensure quality across regulatory variants, geographies, and partner portals, all without hardware overhead.
To ensure quality aligns with business outcomes, test orchestration must connect with test planning, coverage analytics, and defect reporting. This allows QA leaders to prioritize by business risk, monitor velocity vs. stability, and provide stakeholders with actionable insights.
This is known as TestOps. Traditionally, test planning, management, and reporting happens within spreadsheets. However, as organizations scale, spreadsheets prove inefficient to meet to ever-growing, more nuanced demands of QA teams.
Cristiano Caetano, founder of Zephyr Scale, explains this with a CRM analogy:
He believes same principle applies to testing. If you're a small startup building a simple app in the early days, you probably don't need test management tools. It's just a few people hacking things together. Test management is too bureaucratic.
But as you scale, the complexity changes. You move from one or two testers to 15, then 100 or more. How do you manage that? At that point, test management becomes necessary.
With a TestOps system, QA teams can scale more easily with:
As BFSI companies embed test automation into every squad and integrating it with CI/CD pipelines, they establish continuous validation across every code commit, system update, and user journey. That means product teams can ship pricing algorithm changes with confidence by running test suites nightly, linked to actuarial assumptions, customer flows, and compliance thresholds.
Katalon is a unified test automation platform built to help QA, DevOps, and digital teams deliver at speed and scale. Designed for enterprise agility, Katalon empowers BFSI firms to shift testing left, catch issues earlier, and ensure customer trust, without overburdening engineering.
With a Katalon license, you can:
Design UI and API test cases for web, mobile, and desktop apps using low-code frameworks, enabling cross-functional teams to contribute even without deep technical skills --> Testing is democratized.
Execute tests across 3,000+ environment combinations: locally, remotely, on-cloud, using simulators/emulators, or your private lab --> More test scenarios are covered, without the need to invest into extensive physical machines.
Run tests in parallel from the CLI using Katalon Runtime Engine --> Execution time is significantly accelerated.
Integrate seamlessly with your CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Azure DevOps, and more) to trigger tests automatically as code ships --> This creates a continuous feedback loop for the dev team.
Manage test scheduling, monitor results, and generate rich reporting (videos, screenshots, email reports) from a centralized dashboard --> This is especially necessary for QA managers to communicate testing results with business stakeholders and keep everyone aligned on the same page.
📝 If you want a more customized automation testing tool specific for your company, you can request a demo from Katalon using the form on this page.
Sources:
1. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights/scaling-agility-a-new-operating-model-for-insurers
2. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/the-next-acronym-you-need-to-know-about-rpa