subject: Atm Stress Testing [print this page] Banks today are under constant pressure to improve their profits. One of the ways they have been doing that is by using alternate channels and reducing the costs. Some of the most popular and early technology used was ATM. In addition to that there are POS (Point of Sale) devices, Payment Gateways and Credit Cards.
Banks support millions of transactions using ATM , POS and Payment Gateway on weekly or monthly basis. It is of utmost importance to have these channels constantly available (24 x7 x 365) and performing well in terms of response times.
The key questions that the Banks Management wants to know are:
What is the Response Time your customer is getting? (Are we competitive?)
Can your Switch support the traffic from all channels? When will it stress out and BREAK?
You may have machines from various vendors like NCR, Wincor, Diebold, etc. You may be using switch like Base24, Postillion, OPUS, NFS, etc. Your switch will be communicating to the backend like Core Banking Software. These low cost channels need to be on 247 and working efficiently. Do you know if they are available 247?
Some countries have a Penalty on banks if their ATM machines are non operational for certain duration of time.
Does your ATM / POS transaction complete in 30 seconds, 40 seconds or one minute?
There are banks advertising 40% faster ATM transactions as a competitive advantage; the Y-generation needs fast transactions. Are your ATMs fasts enough?
Faster transaction also means you can serve more customers per hour. Are your customers happy? How many customers can you serve every hour?
The speed of a complete end to end transaction becomes important during peak hours and competitive situations. A lot of organizations conduct ATM stress testing, and for POS, PG, and ATM Switch to enhance the performance of service.
In addition, it is also important to do ATM load testing to ensure your systems do not break on facing an increased load situation. This is done when you are upgrading or changing technology, during bank mergers and using EMV or biometric technologies.
