How We Helped a Major UK Bank Cut Release Cycle Time by 40%

A leading UK retail bank was struggling with a slow, manual regression testing process that was blocking releases for weeks at a time. With a growing microservices architecture and six-week release cycles, the QA team was constantly the bottleneck. Critical defects were slipping through to production, and the cost of late-stage fixes was escalating rapidly.

The bank needed a way to dramatically reduce regression testing time while improving coverage across their core banking APIs and customer-facing digital channels.

TestDel embedded a team of four senior automation engineers who worked alongside the bank's existing QA team. We conducted a full audit of the existing test estate, retiring outdated tests and rebuilding the core regression suite using a modern Playwright-based framework with full CI/CD integration.

We introduced a risk-based testing strategy that prioritised critical payment flows and authentication journeys, enabling the team to run targeted regression cycles in hours rather than days. We also implemented API contract testing to catch integration failures earlier in the pipeline.