How to Build a Scalable QA Process for Growing FinTech Products

Quality assurance isn't just a checkbox. It's not just a department. It's the invisible architecture that transforms good products into insanely great ones.

Picture this: You're building a financial technology platform that will change the world. Every line of code, every transaction, every user interaction – they're not just technical details. They're promises. And in the world of fintech, a broken promise can cost you everything.

For CEOs, CTOs, and decision-makers in FinTech companies, the journey from MVP to global scale brings immense opportunities and equally significant challenges. As the user base expands, systems integrate with more partners, and regulatory pressure mounts, quality assurance becomes a critical pillar of success.

At the heart of the challenge is this: how do you scale your QA for fintech to keep up with product growth, while maintaining speed, compliance, and customer trust?

While many companies treat QA as a back-office function, forward-thinking leaders recognize it as a growth enabler.

What FinTech Leaders Are Trying to Achieve

Financial technology operates in a zero-tolerance environment. A single payment processing error, security vulnerability, or compliance oversight can erode years of customer trust and trigger regulatory penalties. While most fintech leaders recognize this reality, many struggle to implement QA processes that simultaneously enable rapid innovation and guarantee ironclad quality.

Aligning QA with Business Objectives

For decision-makers in financial services, the objective isn't just to "test the app" – it's to deliver reliable, secure, and high-performing software at scale. Your QA strategy must therefore align with broader business goals:

• Accelerating time to market for new features, partnerships, and geographies
• Ensuring compliance with evolving financial regulations and standards. 93% of fintech companies find compliance challenging, and over 60% have paid more than $250,000 in compliance fines in a single year, underscoring the financial risks of inadequate QA
• Minimizing operational risk and software bugs in production. Bugs found in production cost up to 30 times more to fix than those caught during development.
• Improving user experience across web, mobile, and API touchpoints
• Supporting DevOps and CI/CD workflows with scalable, automated testing

High stakes in financial software testing

In financial applications, software bugs aren’t just annoyances – they’re potential liabilities.

One API error or untested integration can cause failed transactions, lost funds, or legal exposure. According to the Ponemon Institute, the average cost of an unplanned critical software outage in the financial services industry can exceed $2.3 million, depending on the severity and duration. This includes direct losses, remediation costs, and reputational damage.

The key isn’t just finding defects. It’s about preventing them at scale, across complex infrastructures, in real time.

Why current QA approaches often fail to scale

Many growing fintech companies find their quality processes breaking under the strain of expansion. What worked for a startup with limited features becomes woefully inadequate for a scale-up managing multiple products, currencies, and regulatory frameworks.

Common pain points in fintech QA

The technical debt trap

As fintech products evolve, teams often accumulate technical debt in testing frameworks. What begins as a streamlined process becomes increasingly fragile and resource-intensive:

• Legacy test scripts that no longer align with evolving architecture
• Manual processes that can't scale with product complexity
• Siloed testing approaches that miss critical integration issues
• Insufficient test coverage for regulatory compliance requirements

The capability gap

Even organizations with sophisticated engineering teams often lack specialized QA expertise for financial systems:

• Limited experience testing complex payment flows
• Unfamiliarity with financial compliance verification
• Insufficient tooling for transaction volume simulation
• Gaps in security vulnerability detection

The speed vs. quality dilemma

The tension between speed and quality is a central challenge in software development. Teams are often pressured to deliver new features and products rapidly to stay competitive, but this can come at the expense of software quality. Here’s an expert overview of the dilemma, its risks, and strategies for achieving balance.

• Release timelines compressed to meet market demands
• Testing cycles shortened to accommodate feature velocity
• Regression testing bypassed to meet delivery deadlines
• Compliance verification treated as a post-development activity

Recent perspectives challenge the notion that speed and quality are mutually exclusive. Empirical data and industry reports show that teams with high code quality actually achieve faster development in the long run.

Automated QA helps maintain quality without slowing down delivery – 50% of companies have adopted automated testing tools, which reduce release cycles by 30% and bugs in production by 25%.

Moreover, organizations with mature QA and DevOps practices release software 3.4x more frequently and experience 5.1x fewer failures than those with weaker QA, demonstrating that quality enables faster, safer delivery rather than hindering it

This perception that quality must be sacrificed for speed represents a fundamental misunderstanding of modern QA approaches—and creates unnecessary business risk.

Limited Test Coverage Across Microservices

Most modern FinTech platforms operate on microservices architecture. This structure introduces a new layer of complexity. Without systematic testing across APIs, data flows, and edge cases, errors go undetected until it’s too late.

QA as a Post-Development Task

Many companies mistakenly treat QA as the final checkbox before deployment. This outdated model introduces risk late in the cycle and leads to reactive firefighting instead of proactive prevention.

A Scalable QA Strategy for FinTech Success

To support sustainable growth, QA needs to be a first-class citizen in your engineering strategy. The following principles form the foundation of a scalable QA process:

Shift QA Left

Start QA early in the development lifecycle. From writing testable user stories to automating acceptance tests, early involvement prevents bugs and improves collaboration between dev and QA teams.

In 2024, 68% of QA professionals reported incorporating "shift-left" principles, meaning QA is moving earlier in the development process, but post-development QA remains essential for final validation and regression testing.

Automate the Right Tests

Not every test should be automated – but regression, API, and performance testing are prime candidates. Automation accelerates test execution, improves repeatability, and reduces manual errors.

Build a Flexible QA Team Structure

Adopt a hybrid QA model that blends dedicated internal experts with specialized external resources. Dedicated QA teams can help you scale rapidly, fill skill gaps, and maintain 24/7 coverage.

Use Data to Drive QA Decisions

Implement analytics tools and dashboards to track test coverage, defect trends, and performance metrics. Data-driven QA enables faster debugging, smarter prioritization, and better resource allocation.

Why Common QA Approaches Break Down at Scale

Traditional QA methods often fail to scale as FinTech companies evolve. Manual-heavy testing, disconnected environments, and late-stage quality checks create bottlenecks and vulnerabilities.

As a result:

• Regression testing slows down sprints
• Test coverage is inconsistent across microservices and APIs
• Automation is piecemeal, lacking long-term ROI \

In-House Teams Face Resource Constraints

Hiring and training an internal QA team that can match the growth of your FinTech product – especially in banking application testing or financial application testing – is expensive and time-consuming. QA is also often deprioritized during early-stage scaling, only to become a blocker later.

Without a strategy for scalable resourcing, automation, and performance testing, most companies end up with a reactive QA setup that can't support enterprise-level expectations.

Case Study: How Tipalti Built a Scalable QA Process with DeviQA

Tipalti, a global leader in Accounts Payable Automation, needed a scalable QA approach to support its expansion. The product, designed to manage high-volume international payments with built-in compliance and fraud prevention, required exceptional reliability.

Their core challenge? Maintaining speed of innovation without compromising quality or compliance – all while growing globally.

The Solution

Our partnership began with a single QA engineer and evolved into a full-service collaboration spanning over 12 years. Key initiatives included:

• Designing over 200 detailed software test plans and 7,500+ test cases
• Implementing automated regression testing for both web and API components
• Conducting performance testing with automated scenarios for high-load payment workflows
• Establishing a dedicated QA team with up to 20 specialists to match product growth
• Ensuring 100% coverage of required test scenarios, enabling 25+ safe releases annually \

Measurable Outcomes

Specialized QA partners for Tipalti implemented a comprehensive quality transformation:

Process Evolution

• Established standardized software test plans (STPs) for new features
• Created a scalable QA process with clear entry and exit criteria
• Implemented a structured testing taxonomy with test case management
• Developed dedicated testing environments that mimicked production

Technical Implementation

• Expanded regression test coverage by 300%
• Created over 100 regression test suites
• Reduced regression testing time by 50% through optimization
• Implemented performance testing automation with 100% scenario coverage

Team Augmentation

• Built a flexible QA team that could scale from 1 to 20 engineers based on release needs
• Established knowledge transfer protocols to rapidly onboard specialists
• Trained 10+ QA specialists on the client side to ensure self-sufficiency
• Created comprehensive documentation to preserve institutional knowledge

The results: quantifiable business impact

This strategic approach to QA delivered measurable business outcomes:

• Release Velocity: Successfully delivered over 250 releases and 1,500+ features
• Defect Detection: Identified and addressed more than 12,000 bugs before production
• Critical Issue Prevention: Caught over 5,000 critical/blocker issues pre-release
• Testing Efficiency: Cut regression testing time in half while tripling coverage

Most importantly, this scalable QA framework enabled the platform to grow from a startup to an enterprise-grade financial solution trusted by multinational corporations, without sacrificing either speed or quality.

The result? Tipalti scaled from a single founder-led startup to a global FinTech brand – without QA ever becoming a bottleneck.

Why This Matters for FinTech Leaders Today

Reduce Risk, Accelerate Delivery

Whether you're launching new banking features, integrating with third-party systems, or handling multi-currency transactions, a robust QA process:

• Reduces the cost of defects
• Enables faster, safer deployment
• Protects brand integrity in highly regulated markets

Scalable QA = Scalable Growth

From API stability to performance under load, software testing in financial services must evolve as your company grows. QA is not a fixed task – it’s an infrastructure layer that supports your product roadmap.

By aligning QA with your business objectives, you unlock predictable, scalable growth.

Making QA a Boardroom Priority

Why CEOs and CTOs Should Care

Quality isn't just an engineering concern – it's a business asset. Prioritizing QA at the leadership level drives faster innovation, customer satisfaction, and compliance readiness. Here's how:

• Faster Time-to-Market: Automated testing cuts cycle times and reduces rework.
• Lower Total Cost of Ownership: Early bug detection saves millions in production fixes.
• Regulatory Confidence: Proven test frameworks reduce audit risk.
• Stronger Brand Trust: Fewer bugs mean happier customers and fewer complaints.

Turning QA into a Strategic Lever

McKinsey research shows that organizations with mature QA and DevOps practices are able to release software 50% faster and reduce critical defects by up to 40%, compared to those with traditional QA models.

By aligning QA with product roadmaps, risk management, and business KPIs, leaders can transform testing from a development afterthought to a competitive differentiator.

How to Get Started

At DeviQA, we’ve helped FinTech companies like Tipalti scale securely and quickly. Whether you're looking to audit your current QA process, outsource part of your testing, or build a long-term quality strategy, we’re here to help.

For fintech executives looking to develop a scalable quality framework, consider these actionable next steps:

1. Assess Your Current State

Begin with an honest evaluation of your existing QA processes:

• How much time does regression testing currently require?
• What percentage of critical bugs are discovered in production?
• How comprehensively are you validating compliance requirements?
• How effectively does your testing simulate real-world financial scenarios?

This baseline assessment reveals the most significant opportunities for improvement.

2. Identify Strategic Priorities

Based on your assessment, identify the highest-impact areas for improvement.

API testing becomes crucial for complex integrations, performance testing addresses high-volume platforms, automated regression testing services support rapid development cycles, and security testing protects sensitive financial applications.

By focusing on the quality dimensions most relevant to your specific business model, you can prioritize investments for maximum return.

3. Consider Specialized Expertise

While many fintech companies have strong engineering teams, specialized QA expertise can truly transform how you build software. QA consulting services are about getting smart advice from people who really understand testing. These are experts who don't just give tips, but help you rethink how you approach quality. They'll help you build testing methods that actually make your product better and faster.

External QA partners with financial domain knowledge can help bridge capability gaps while your internal processes mature.

Book a free QA audit or schedule a discovery call with our FinTech testing specialists. Let’s build a quality assurance process that grows with your business – not against it.