Fintech QA Playbook: <30m regressions, KYC/SCA ready

What makes fintech QA different

Payments, identity, and compliance require deterministic evidence. Tests must cover edge cases on ledgers, retries, and SCA while producing audit-ready artifacts.

Week 1–2: stabilize the core

• Map critical paths: card, wallet, BNPL, refunds, chargebacks
• Lock test data: idempotent payments, seeded accounts, FX scenarios
• Set SLOs: <30m regression, <2% flake, 0 escaped P1s on core flows

Week 3–4: coverage with confidence

• Contract tests on payment/KYC providers; simulate downtime and slow responses
• SCA step-up: OTP retries, device binding, fallback to email/voice
• Ledger accuracy: settlement rounding, FX conversions, idempotency keys

Week 5–6: compliance and evidence

• Evidence packs: test IDs, env, data set, outcome, and control mapping
• Quality gates: block deploys if change-fail > target or flake >2%
• DAST/SAST gating: feed findings to the same release checklist

Tooling stack

Playwright/Cypress for UI, Pact for contracts, k6/JMeter for performance spikes, LaunchDarkly for gated rollouts, and GitHub Actions for selection/parallelism.

Outcome: reliable releases, auditor-ready evidence, and customer flows that don’t break under load or compliance change.