Financial services are unique businesses among others, necessary for any economic system. They cover many different activities, with very different implications. While exacting customers, specific regulations and tough competition are demanding better and better quality services for less and less money and shorter time to market, the complexity of IT solutions increases heavily and testing becomes more challenging than ever.

Let's see how a carefully set-up and properly managed Test Centre can leverage the economy-of-scale and expertise to save a significant amount of time and money in different corporate scenarios, whilst providing defined measures for qualified decisions of key stakeholders.

The scope, responsibilities and offered resources or services of a Test Centre depends largely on its context such as: business scope, processes, organizational structure and functions, fusions & acquisitions, on-site / in-house / outsourced / off-shored / multi-shored environments, homogenous vs. heterogeneous infrastructure, local / regional / global presence, etc. They also depend on senior management expectations, as well as their confidence and support. Since there is no “best practice” model fitting well all circumstances, this presentation unveils the most typical situations and suggested Test Centre models to address them:

• Supportive centres for underlying test infrastructure
• Competence centres providing on-demand resources to projects and programmes
• Service oriented test centres