White papers

Distributed ledger technology (DLT) innovation is an important trend shaping the financial services industry. It’s no surprise that under the pressure of ongoing overall digital transformation, many financial institutions are keen to adopt DLT in development of their platforms. However, when the innovation is introduced on a scale of a major capital market participant, its potential impact is likely to be shared by a larger financial services community. To facilitate the smooth transition towards the emerging technologies, the regulatory bodies require systemically important financial market infrastructures to ensure that while innovating, they also stay operationally resilient.

"Never invest in a business you cannot understand," – the famous quote attributed to Warren Buffett also holds true for fintech innovation and may suggest that lack of knowledge about your technology assets can put your digital transformation budgets at substantial risk.

As regulated entities vital for the financial markets ecosystem, CCPs and exchanges recognize the importance of quality and resilience of their platforms. Thorough software testing is fundamental in identifying problems that can affect system integrity. Software testing encompasses Functional Testing which ensures that the system works according to specifications and satisfies the compliance requirements, and Non-functional Testing spanning the assessment of performance, latency, capacity, reliability and operability. Test automation decreases time to market and boosts verification coverage.

The greatest interest to artificial intelligence (AI) methods and technologies has emerged over the last years in many areas of human activities directly or indirectly related to IT. Predictably, these areas include software testing and QA. For the professionals aiming at working in the software testing area and applying AI to solving their tasks on a daily basis, a new exam has now emerged. It is called AI and Software Testing. The certification is provided by the Alliance for Qualification (A4Q).

An October 2019 survey by BoE and FCA found that ML in financial organizations has already passed an initial development phase, and the usage of live ML applications is about to dramatically increase over the next three years. Artificial Intelligence systems are used in market surveillance, they are providing intellectual analysis of news feeds, and they are an important part of the conversational agents facing users and helping them with their business needs from identity verification to trading and portfolio management. How to ensure that an AI-powered system is up to its task? And what would that mean from the software testing perspective?

As an R3 technology partner and a member of Hyperledger, Exactpro is familiar with the software testing challenges of a DLT-based post-trade infrastructure. To meet the needs of a growing number of companies widely using blockchain technologies to automate their business services, Exactpro specialists have performed a DLT post-trade case study based on the open source Corda and Hyperledger technology.