Otoma
Next Gen Implementation Automation

In today’s global business environment, financial services companies compete on the basis of achieving speed and differentiation. Automation has become the focus of interest in this pursuit, as it can help deliver better services, greater cost savings, and enhance customer experience, all at unprecedented efficiency. Technological developments, market shifts, and increasing regulatory and investor scrutiny are playing a crucial role in affecting the revenue growth and operating efficiencies of the financial services industry. Enter Otoma. The company's banking platform offers a comprehensive suite of modules that puts the power of automation to users in the finance industry.

While conversing with the CIO Applications’ editorial team, Reuven Ben Menachem, the Co-founder and Chairman of the Board, Zack Yaniv, the CEO and Co-founder of Otoma, and Tali Maryanka, head of product management, shared their insights on the current market trends, the company’s offerings, and value proposition that the company imparts to its clients.

Could you provide us a brief overview about your company?

We have worked together for over 20 plus years and built Fundtech (NASDAQ: FNDT) from a startup to a global leader in transaction banking payment systems. Fundtech was sold in 2015 to D+H for $1.25B (today Finastra). Otoma was founded in 2016 and our vision is to truly transform the way financial institutions implement and manage critical software applications by giving them innovative new technology that will dramatically improve the process, timing, economics and success of application implementation, testing, and monitoring. We have a team of 25 plus people with experience in developing, implementing and supporting critical applications with hundreds of the world’s leading financial institutions. The breadth and depth of our experience and a deep understanding of the issues banks face with the current implementation and testing process has led Otoma to build a unique technology solution—the Otoma Banking Platform, a new way of implementing and maintaining complex financial applications.

What are some of the trends that you expect to have an impact in the software testing solution space this year and how is Otoma planning to leverage these trends and evolve?

We know that Intelligent Automation is the main trend which is transforming the world of testing in 2020 and beyond. Software test automation tools are extending from automated execution to improving the automation coverage via intelligence-driven test design, optimization and maintenance. With the growing effects of DevOps and continuous integration, handling frequent changes to an application is the top challenge as the need for continuous testing becomes a necessity. Another key component will be to increase the level of automation and coverage of the testing which in many cases remain a highly manual and time-consuming process. The automation of the requirements and design process form the foundation for automated test execution and will become a more important first element in end-2-end intelligent automation.

Combining these two key components and enabling the technology to apply real intelligence across all elements of the testing framework, from requirements design to use and test case creation and execution, and to issue analysis and reporting, will enable organizations to deliver better test design and ever faster testing cycles. This will also improve test coverage and accuracy, and the ability to identify and address issues far earlier and with greater insight. While Agile methodologies continue to grow in adoption, the ever-changing applications with increased complexity and number of new releases, a need to shift-left testing and empower non-QA resources and manual testers to contribute to test automation efforts is becoming crucial.

More people across the organizations are involved in the testing and implementation (Business analyst, developers, QA). With BDD/TDD and other shift-left testing practices, the responsibility also shifts to business analysts and SMEs. With the Otoma Platform, these non-technical resources can easily create automated scripts and simplify the testing and implementation.

What are the major challenges CIOs of leading companies face in the software testing solution space and how is Otoma effectively addressing these issues?

In banking, CIOs face major challenges to their most critical infrastructure primarily by regulatory demands and oversight and the criticality of the financial technology they provide to the bank for the markets and clients it serves. Strict regulations regularly force change through ongoing compliance, and in many cases, CIOs and their teams have limited time to analyze and understand the impact this will have on their systems.

The need to design and test for these changes quickly to meet the regulatory deadlines creates major demand on their resources. Coupled with this is the ongoing need to adapt new technologies to meet new demands of the business and clients they serve. There is also a need for a more joined up and collaborative approach to testing between the banks and their vendors and testing partners.

Otoma's approach is to deliver a common and shared knowledge base technology with intelligent automation that understands the industry, regulation, banks specific processes, and the way software supplier applications process. Having greater intelligence, automation, and collaboration in their ability to test for these demands can help CIO's address the challenges and improve their ability to deliver change more quickly, efficiently and with greater accuracy and confidence in the outcomes they are striving for.

Could you shed some light on your range of software testing solutions, the methodology of their implementation, features and benefits involved?

The Otoma Platform enables financial institutions to accelerate and simplify the testing of packaged vendor software and industry specific solutions. Taking payment processing systems as our starting point, it combines deep knowledge of common payment processing applications and end2end integration points with a library of use-cases and test-cases that reflect this knowledge. This enables banks to start testing from an advanced position, accelerating their testing strategies and giving greater confidence in what they are testing and the outcomes they can expect. It will also offer a testing framework and infrastructure, knowledge base and toolset, that will allow greater collaboration and cohesion between the clients and their software vendors.

To help understand the methodology, features and benefits of Otoma our proposition uniquely combines the following key elements:

OUR TEAM: Having led the payments technology market for 20 plus years with Fundtech and developed and tested payment processing technology with banks globally, our industry experience and proven success brings an unparalleled level of expertise. We are bringing this business, technology and testing experience together to deliver the Otoma Platform and a new intelligent testing proposition for all organizations struggling with the traditional processes of implementing, testing and managing critical software applications.

OUR PLATFORM: We have a unique industry Knowledge Base and framework technology that includes the business scenarios, operating environment, compliance requirements, protocols and formats related to the industry and business area the application is being tested for. This knowledge base provides the foundation for full end2end testing, 80-90% coverage of what an organization and business will need to design and test, and tools to adapt the knowledge base repository to specific test requirements.

TESTING SUITED TO PACKAGED APPLICATIONS: We accelerate implementation by adapting our knowledge base technology to fit the specific packaged applications used by the bank, describing the vendor products, configurations, versions, interfaces and protocols.

END-TO-END TESTING: Our fully integrated platform provides end-to-end capability requirement analysis and discovery, test case production, along with up-to-date documentation, autonomous testing including automatic test design and test execution, validation of results, and dashboards for monitoring testing and implementing changes.

AI BASED PROCESS-MINING ALGORITHMS: Our sophisticated tools and unique algorithms help to discover business scenarios that exist in the production environment which were not identified in the requirements and test design. This ensures organizations systems can always aligned to the approved requirements and quickly identify when systems may perform or process in a way that will create business and client issues.

INTUITIVE USER EXPERIENCE: Many test tools are designed for sophisticated IT users with technical testing knowledge. We make it easy for the users of all disciplines to use our technology and adapt it to their needs using our business-driven language, visualization tools, and advanced user interface.

What does the future of Otoma look like?

AI and Machine Learning will have a greater impact on the testing solution space with increasing numbers of practical applications more closely aligned to specific areas of testing and test monitoring. AI and Machine Learning will have a greater influence on traditional software testing. It will enable increased automation, replace or augment human testers to meet aggressive quality and timeline demands, and help monitor the increasing complexity of an organization’s software and technology landscape. Looking into Otoma’s future, we will continue to apply AI and machine learning to our technology, and we will expand our reach toward other industries such as Insurance and Telecom to name a few. We are also looking at providing Business Intelligence based on process mining.