1. Please tell us a bit about yourself, your background, what you do at Certua and outside of Certua.
Hello, my name is Ivan. At the present I am working as Head of Platform Testing at Certua. My day-to-day priority is to focus on the functionality of our key platform and to ensure that all services are working correctly.
Throughout my career, I have always been in touch with information technology, informatics and AI. Before joining the Certua, I have worked on computer vision and banking systems. That was a great experience to understand various technologies that work together behind the scenes. As the systems are complex, there is need to ensure it all works harmoniously together. Since then, I realized my interest in testing software. It was also topic of my final thesis of my study at university.
In my free time I like to be with my family and doing some cycling. Good books and music are also my favourites. Also I am interested in cars and motorsport.
2. What are the most important parts of software system used in Certua?
Certua is building solutions which aim to build insurance or credit products quickly and in a way that is directly ready for end customers. Through the years, Certua has designed and built in-house the ultimate platform which is able to offer the functionality for such products. The key part of our financial platform is our product builder. It has a powerful and easily modified expert system for underwriting and decisions making, pricing system and API with UX for application journey and servicing. There is also support for external systems such as payments, accounting, open banking integration and campaigns. We also provide big data analysis by integrating machine learning and artificial intelligence, which can be easily plugged into the quote and buy journey. All of these subsystems have lots of clever functions and many others are still being added to help our platform to become even more easy to use and powerful. The integration between each part of the platform is key and have to always work together to ensure platform stability and performance.
3. How does Certua ensure all requested functionality work accordingly?
Each platform build is tested by various types of testing methods. The tests are prepared by the QA team for each specific function and different variations of test scenarios. The tests are a combination of manual analysis and automated tests done with various testing tools. Lot of automated testing tools are also custom built in-house at Certua. The key in this process is to understand how things work and then adapt new tests on top of it. For all the tests we do, we are using test cases management with test execution. We are only pleased if all tests have passed and no issues are presented.
4. What are the challenges you face in your daily tasks?
I'm keen to explore new built functionality and see how things are working together. Our offered products need to be configured per requirements which need to be verified before we go live. The real challenge is to track data interactions between various components and see how all of them affect the system's behaviours. "I believe that only with a good understanding of how the technology works behind the scenes can a tester perform comprehensive testing and ultimately achieve a good working solution". With complex systems like we have, working with database, web API etc, it requires me to be all-hands-on-deck and constantly extend my experiences and skills. Working with other members of the team, sharing knowledge and providing each other guidance are also important part of my position.
5. What is Certua like from your perspective?
I think that Certua is bringing new and innovative approaches into the fintech world. Certua focuses on financial product building with the ambition to simplify the current archaic market solutions and to create new unique ways to build products. All the teams in the company work together in a fantastic way and I believe we are on good track to succeed.
6. Describe Certua in 3 words
Innovative, Lasting, Pleasant
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