It’s been over 25 years since I was a developer, writing payment applications for eftpos payment terminals, and a lot has changed in that time. The terminals have become more sophisticated and capable, supporting chip and contactless cards, touch screens and wireless communications. Many of the terminals now also support value added services apps running alongside the traditional payment apps. And the payment applications themselves have also become far more complex and with that comes an increasing need to test. It was hard enough testing the terminal applications I remember developing back in the 1990’s. Now with ever more complex standards from the card schemes, EMV Level 2 and Level 3 and more local acquirers and issuer requirements, the tasks seem to grow all the time. What also changes with this complexity is the frequency of app updates.  I remember back in the ‘90’s that applications sometimes remained in the field for a long time, often more than a year, that’s no longer the case.

Payment terminal testing is a necessary evil, it’s not something anyone really wants to do, but is an essential, time consuming and costly part of terminal application development and deployment. The financial and reputational risks are too high to not do It properly.

Abrantix has developed test automation tools for several years, consisting of software products that work alongside test robots. These robots automate the manual interactions necessary to test an eftpos payment terminal such as the insertion of cards and the pushing of buttons. At Abrantix we use the tools and robots in-house to test the terminal applications that we deliver to our clients, and we provide them to companies who need to perform their own terminal testing.

One of Abrantix’s recent offerings from the payment test automation team is PaytestHub, a cloud-based service, designed to enable our customers to perform real device testing from the cloud. PaytestHub integrates with the Abrantix physical testing robots, enabling its users to run physical tests on real terminals from any location 24 hours a day.

With the capability to

 > perform tests with multiple contact or contactless cards (or mobile phones) using the card multiplexer and card probe,

 > using cameras and OCR to read screen prompts, and

 > the powerful and fast robot finger to push buttons or gesture on touch screens

you have everything you need to run full tests suites.

Abrantix has also started to offer its clients testing as service. This testing is largely performed on robots running in the Abrantix test laboratories and is managed by specialist test engineers from our dedicated team based in Slovenia. The tests can managed and executed by the Abrantix team, or you can run the tests remotely using PaytestHub making use of robots setup in Abrantix’s laboratories.

If automating or outsourcing your payment terminal testing is of interest, let us explain how we can help.
contact us here!