Penny testing

Penny testing is a common practice in banking that seeks to issue a few small value transactions to test each processing permutation in order to confirm that all the enabling systems and configurations are working as intended. This is usually done in the initial set up of bank profiles in Sandbox environments and again in Production environments with live transactions before "go-live".

We will start configuring your services as soon as your commercial agreements with us are signed, you have discussed your needs with us, you have paid the necessary fees and provided approvals where necessary to make them available.

Where customers use the SO model, BankTech will perform the bank web-service and/or H2H configuration. Once the Sandbox environment is set up, we will begin generating and submitting penny tests to lay the foundation for your Production solution. Once the Production environment is configured, we will also conduct live penny tests and seek your acceptance of those.

Where customers use the SmartBanking model, BankTech will be able to leverage existing integrations to bypass the need for extensive penny testing. We will still perform Sandbox and Production penny tests to confirm the correctness of the configuration, but this process will be significantly shorter as we are able to reuse existing code and configurations that are already confirmed as working.

The duration of bank integration and penny testing activities depends not only on the processing model employed but also the support and availability of the acquiring bank. It is good practice to establish a project team that involves your Product Owner, our Operations Engineers and the bank's H2H specialists to adequately manage complex processing configurations and accelerate their release.

Estimated durations of basic penny testing are provided below:

Model	EstimatedDuration	ProjectTeam
System Operator (SO)	10 working days	True
SmartBanking (TPPP)	5 working days	False

It should be noted that the above assumes a single billing profile is being used. Where multiple profiles or short names are being implemented or where various services are being implemented, one may multiply out this basic effort estimation with the number of permutations and a factor of 0.05. For example 10 working days + (10 permutations * 10 working days * factor of 0.05) = 15 working days.

For 11 to 100 permutations, it is required that a project team is established even for SmartBanking models. With the right team and appropriate planning in advance with the acquiring bank, one may multiply out this basic effort estimation with the number of permutations and a factor of 0.01. For example 10 working days + (100 permutations * 10 working days * factor of 0.01) = 20 working days.

Additional notice periods and onboarding fees may be charged for more than 100 permutations and a factor of 0.001 may be used for hundreds of permutations. If you'd like to learn more about the definitions of permutations and how to optimise your bank profiles structure for maximum processing speed and flexibility, then you should head over to our Managing bank profiles article.