Ascert expands certification, ATM testing, and end-to-end test capabilities with Ascertified, its cloud-based testing service. 

Ascert continues to expand its testing service offerings via the Ascertified Cloud. “This last year has shown amazing growth in the flexibility of offerings to the financial services industry,” says Mike Wainwright, Ascert’s Director of EMEA Sales.  “A few short years ago, many of the companies we talked to were reticent to use a cloud-based service because of security concerns. The beauty of what we deliver is that it is a highly secure and flexible platform that readily passes companies’ security reviews. Its flexibility gives us the capability to host thousands of these secure connections, providing on-demand automated testing services.” 

The beginning of the year marked a fast start with an expansion of the range of testing available within the Faster Payments Scheme Accreditation Service running on Ascertified.com. A total of nine financial technology companies are using the service to certify to the FPS Central Infrastructure. It’s anticipated that usage of this FinTech service will expand in 2018. 

Ascert also marked the year with expanded cloud testing capabilities to assist with PSD2 implementation, API testing, and other types of test certifications. “Our cloud platform enables companies to provide a simple yet effective pre-certification platform where organizations wishing to expand their consumer reach can prepare their systems to interface with the consumer’s personal banking institution,” said Wainwright. The benefit to the financial institution is that it lessens the impact on system resources during this transition period and does so in a fast and cost-efficient manner. 

The company plans to also offer ATM and card level testing services via the Ascertified Cloud in 2018; greatly expanding their customers’ ability to conduct end-to-end testing while achieving rapid scalability and cost savings. 


About Ascert:  
Ascert is recognized as a leading provider of premier testing software solutions. Ascert was founded in 1992 to provide automated software testing solutions that help companies measure the performance, reliability and scalability of their mission-critical back-end servers and applications. With over 100 clients worldwide, Ascert's products and services are used at some of the world's most successful companies.  

Off-the-shelf simulators include solutions for EFT testing, POS testing, stress testing, ATM testing, Fraud testing, IFX testing, EMV/chip card testing, ISO8583 testing and 3270 & 6530 terminal testing. Ascert’s custom simulators have been used for testing air traffic control systems and biometric payment systems. Ascert delivers flexible solutions that are either customer site installed or accessed via Ascert’s remote testing service platform, Ascertified.com. Ascert's products assist testing professionals across industry segments to better manage their testing processes and environments through an end-to-end tool set. 

​For inquiries in the America’s and Asia-Pacific:  
Dr. Richard B. Greene, DBA 
Ascert, LLC  
759 Bridgeway  
Sausalito, CA 94965, USA  
Telephone: 1-415-339-8500  
Toll Free:1-877-ASCERT-IT  
Fax: 1-415-339-8501  
E-mail: info@ascert.com  
http://www.ascert.com 

For inquiries in Europe, Middle East, and Africa: 
Mike Wainwright 
Ascert Limited 
3rd Floor Signet House 
49 - 51 Farringdon Road 
London EC1M 3JP England 
Telephone: +44 (20) 7488 3470 
Fax: +44 (20) 7488 3477 
E-mail: ukinfo@ascert.com 
http://www.ascert.com 

Twenty-five years of innovation, growth and solid business philosophies lead the company to a historic milestone

Sausalito, California – 14th November 2017. Ascert has reached an exciting milestone as the company celebrates 25 years of delivering innovative testing technologies. Using Ascert’s automated testing offerings over the past quarter century, financial institutions have improved their day-to-day business operations, enhanced their ability to take valuable services to market faster for their customers, and helped to achieve significant operating cost reductions.

In 1992, before the coining of the “Fintech“ name for our industry, Ascert recognized the need to provide financial institutions with testing tools that made a real difference to the quality and development of financial solutions to the marketplace. This motivation and founding spirit remains the same today. The end goal has always been to deliver testing tools that enable automated solutions that are predictive, powerful, and protect the integrity of the financial transaction processing networks and applications. Ascert has achieved this goal through its continued adoption of advanced technology coupled with an ongoing commitment to excellence.

Ascert is led by Andrew Mould and Rob Walker, and has maintained its privately-held ownership throughout its history. This has allowed Ascert to control key strategic and business decisions that have ensured a consistent focus on meeting the specific business needs of its customer base.

“This last 25 years has been the most interesting and rewarding period of my professional career,” said Andrew Mould, Ascert’s Managing Partner and one if its co-founders. “Our first line of testing products was developed by listening to what the marketplace wanted and needed, and establishing great relationships with our first customers. We continue that successful practice of listening to our customers and have been able to deliver world-class testing products that make a significant difference in protecting their businesses. I want to express a big thanks to our hundreds of valued customers and strategic partners who have helped us to be a leader in testing technologies.”

"We have achieved this milestone through the hard work and dedication of our associates and our entire organization’s commitment to high levels of customer service” said Rob Walker, Ascert’s other Managing Partner. Mr Walker is also the founder of Ascert in the UK, which is itself celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. “We have dedicated ourselves to 25 years of product innovation and providing testing

technologies that really make a difference to our customers. I attribute our success to our singular focus of helping companies streamline the way they test their internal and external transaction and communication networks, enabling opportunities to achieve both production efficiencies as well as increased revenue possibilities.”

Over the last quarter century, Ascert’s suite of product offerings has expanded in response to customers’ evolving business expectations and technological needs. Initially designed for the Tandem Computer (HPE NonStop), where “failure was not an option”, it now operates on any hardware platform in addition to being available as a cloud-based service. Ascert’s technologies have shown they can truly withstand the ultimate test – that of time; we look forward to continuing that for many more years.

About Ascert: Ascert is recognized as a leading provider of premier testing software solutions. Ascert was founded in 1992 to provide automated software testing solutions that help companies measure the performance, reliability and scalability of their mission-critical back-end servers and applications. With over 100 clients worldwide, Ascert's products and services are used at some of the world's most successful companies.

Off-the-shelf simulators for Ascert’s VersaTest product include solutions for EFT testing, POS testing, stress testing, ATM testing, Fraud testing, IFX testing, EMV/chip card testing, ISO8583 testing and 3270 & 6530 terminal testing. Ascert’s custom simulators have been used for testing air traffic control systems and biometric payment systems. Ascert delivers flexible solutions that are either customer site installed or accessed via Ascert’s cloud-based Ascertified Testing Service. Ascert's products assist testing professionals across industry segments to better manage their testing processes and environments through an end-to-end tool set.

For inquiries in the America’s and Asia-Pacific: Richard B. Greene Ascert, LLC 759 Bridgeway Sausalito, CA 94965, USA Telephone: 1-415-339-8500 Toll Free:1-877-ASCERT-IT

Fax: 1-415-339-8501 E-mail: info@ascert.comhttp://www.ascert.com

For inquiries in Europe, Middle East, and Africa: Mike Wainwright Ascert Limited 3rd Floor Signet House 49 - 51 Farringdon Road London EC1M 3JP England Telephone: +44 (20) 7488 3470 Fax: +44 (20) 7488 3477 E-mail: ukinfo@ascert.com http://www.ascert.com

The latest update to Ascert’s VTERM product adds significant automation to the process of testing green screen 6530 & 3270 applications

Because of the proprietary nature of many legacy systems, converting to a new architecture is neither easy nor cheap. Often, because of the prohibitive cost to replace legacy systems, many companies choose to retain the legacy investment but modernize the underlying infrastructure. Typically this will involve activities such as re-hosting and consolidating onto shared server infrastructures and streamlining processes to realize time and cost savings.

But changes such as these need testing, and testing 6530 & 3270 terminal based applications is a notoriously manual task. Which is where tools such as the VersaTest VTERM driver come into play. It makes perfect sense in both financial and practical terms to modernize and automate a legacy testing model at the same time as the applications legacy hosting and operational processes are being updated. VTERM’s capabilities go beyond mere automation of the execution of tests though. Ascert has created a unique approach for capturing manual test interactions and automatically creating a test script that be reused whenever needed. This results in a significant reduction in redundant activities that occur both in human and system resources during the test process.

“Our latest version of VTERM adds significantly more automation features and a deeper integration with the VersaTest Automator product,” says Rob Walker, Managing Partner at Ascert. Some companies we talk to estimate that more than 50% of their resources are used to maintain their legacy systems. Testing is a big part of that and VTERM capitalizes on our proprietary testing technology to easily create automation where once there was unnecessary use of labor.” Walker also noted “Support for green screen testing has been a part of our solution set for practically the whole of the 25 years Ascert has been in business. It’s great to see that legacy being continued and extended with this new version. Integrating VTERM as a first-class peer within the VersaTest Automator ecosystem allows us to offer much greater levels of automation and integration with our other drivers, plus enables access to third party tools such as Quality Center through our plugins. The migration of our underlying terminal handling code to Java brings us other benefits too – not least the ability to use commodity sever hardware to build much more powerful stress test rigs”. Finally, Walker concluded “It’s easy to get caught up in the hype of new technologies, but sometimes figuring out how to do your existing things better can deliver just as much reward. Legacy systems may be old, but that doesn’t mean there’s no need or value in improving how we work with them.”

The VTERM green screen 6530 & 3270 driver is an add-on module to VersaTest Automator, providing yet another solution to the problem of expensive, time consuming and error-prone testing practices. This helps to solve many of the problems associated with shorter release cycles, allowing the testing phase to happen rapidly. Ascert provides the flexibility of VTERM with either inhouse server or cloud based implementation options.

​Building on its robust library of interface simulations, Ascert makes available a cloud-based version of its UK Link LIS5 simulator.

LIS5 is the standard followed by the national UK Switch, maintained by Vocalink, for transactions originating at ATMs. Ascert has supported the LIS5 standard with a pre-packaged VersaTest driver and scripts built on Ascert's Driver Framework Standard (DFS) since its release, and it is a standard component of the larger Ascert VersaTest Automator solution.

By following the VersaTest Automator model, the LIS5 Driver provides very fine-grained test definition, and a high level of test automation and validation. The exact format and contents of messages to be exchanged and verified can be defined and modified entirely through data and configuration files. The LIS5 Driver allows banks to have confidence that their applications will conform to message protocol specifications and provides an environment in which revised versions of their applications can be regression tested to ensure that any changes have not adversely impacted the interoperability of the application.

In a new option for its customers the LIS5 Driver is now available to be accessed by banks for pre-certification and functional testing via Ascertified, Ascert’s cloud-based testing platform. The Ascertified Portal provides a flexible cloud-based testing solution for QA, development, and certification testing. Based on VersaTest technology, this service offers affordable cost of user-ship and rapid start-up for new testing environments.

Mike Wainwright, Ascert’s Business Development Director in EMEA said, “The addition of support for the LIS5 standard within the Ascertified platform is a further demonstration of the flexibility of VersaTest, and our commitment to expand the breadth of our cloud-based solutions, and ‘testing as a service’. The Ascertified based LIS5 Driver and its associated test packs for both issuer and acquirer transactions are already in use and proving very successful. We will continue to add new driver support within Ascertified as our customers demand these.”

Ascert expands new cloud based API testing services for financial transactions

Mobile commerce continues to expand rapidly into a variety of arenas; both cloud based as well as new hardware areas. With over 1.3 billion debit and credit card accounts globally, opportunities for new payment mechanisms are unlimited.

In this fast growth environment, the ability to quickly test new API’s and onboard payment partners is a serious challenge. Accelerating time-to-market for new applications and services is a priority and having the right test and certification strategies can be a major advantage. To meet this growing need, Ascert has expanded test capabilities via its Ascertified Portal, which provides a flexible cloud based testing environment for QA, development, and certification testing.

“The last thing you need is an API failure or data breach to bring your project to a halt, and your company to its knees,” says Paul Springston, Ascert’s Director of Professional Services. “With Ascert's Ascertified testing technology, you can put your APIs through all the paces by checking the security of your REST and SOAP transactions, without incurring risk of failure and costly delays.”

Based on our popular VersaTest technology, Ascertified is a subscription fee service that offers affordability and rapid start-up for new testing environments. API testing, EMV test certification, automatic error identification, and a fully functional testing sandbox, are just a few of the services available through Ascertified.

Ascert's VersaTest family of testing and certification products can assist any organization looking to add increased value to their operations. To find out more about Ascert products and standard test interfaces visit the Ascert web site or contact a local Ascert office.

​Having access to an open testing environment is critical in today's complex market. Unfortunately there are testing products that are good for a standard, off-the-shelf shop, and others favoring custom environments.

Why choose a testing tool that limits your options?

VersaTest, from Ascert, gives you virtually unlimited choices.

Ascert can provide standard drivers, or users can create their own....or we can do a mix of both. Openness is the key, and Ascert can give you the flexibility you need for all of your testing needs.

Ascert builds advanced automated testing solutions that help with virtually all testing scenarios by allowing users the widest range of testing functionality, thus reducing the number of individual products that must be licensed and implemented.

Contact us to see how VersaTest can be YOUR TOTAL SOLUTION.

Building on Ascert’s growing suite of automated testing tools, the company releases its Virtual Terminal Simulation Module for VersaTest Automator 
​
As an innovator in test automation, Ascert has launched a new version of its Virtual Terminal Simulation Module (VTERM) to operate natively in its newest generation of testing products, VersaTest Automator. The VTERM product, which was originaly created within Ascert’s VersaTest Classic product, has been used successfully by customers for many years to automate the test process for green screen applications.However that version required an HP NonStop (formerly Tandem) server, in order to operate – that is no longer the case.  

This latest version leverages the end-to-end testing environment provided by VersaTest Automator, enabling the coordinated testing of green screen applications alongside other headless interfaces, such as payments networks and back-end hosts. Adoption of this latest version has occurred with companies in various sectors including financial services and retail.  

“Many of today's server-based applications are developed to utilize the sophisticated graphical capabilities of PC's or workstations for user input and display. But, in many instances, the ‘behind the scenes’ applications in very large companies are legacy green screen applications based on older terminal technology, such as the Tandem 6530 or IBM 3270", said Paul Springston, Ascert’s Director of Professional Services. “VTERM eliminates the manually intensive process of testing these interfaces and automates the process. Our customers who have implemented VTERM have been able to recognize significant reductions in testing time almost immediately. This latest version, operating natively within a VersaTest Automator environment, provides them with even greater orchestration capabilities for their complex testing environments."

​VTERM Terminal Simulator, and add-on module to VersaTest Automator, provides yet another solution to the problem of expensive, time consuming and error-prone testing practices. It is joined by the VersaTest Jenkins Plug-in for Continuous Testing which Ascert recently released to the marketplace.

​To find out more about VTERM or other Ascert testing technologies, contact us.  

Ascert continues to expand its testing capabilities with the release of the VersaTest Jenkins Plug-in for Continuous Testing

Ascert continues to increase the usability of its testing technology by officially launching the VersaTest Jenkins Plug-in for Continuous Testing. “We’re about making our technology more accessible to testing professionals that need to take advantage of the latest capabilities in the rapidly changing development landscape,” says Simon Miles, Ascert’s Chief Architect. “Several years ago, we saw the increasing trend for the implementation of continuous integration. Companies were effectively using it to get product to market faster, with more efficiencies, and less cost. The problem was that no FinTech company had come up with the right tool to enable automated testing to be integrated into the process using Jenkins. Until now. That’s what the VersaTest Jenkins Plug-in for Continuous Testing  does.”  

In the process of introducing an efficient means of testing into the development flow, Ascert worked with a major financial institution who is at the forefront of rapid product development using continuous integration to better serve their customers. The result was an elegant solution that fits nicely into continuous integrated development. 

The VersaTest Jenkins Plug-in for Continuous Testing represents another major product expansion for Ascert in 2016; joining the latest addition, VTERM for Automator, which automates legacy green screen applications. ​