Dedicated QA and test automation for a Sydney payments fintech

Before engaging Corpshore, the company's developers were writing most of their own tests alongside feature work, with no dedicated QA function and only partial test automation. Regression coverage was thin enough that releases regularly slipped while the team manually re-checked payment flows, and a growing backlog of exploratory and edge-case testing kept getting pushed to the next sprint.

The team started with three QA engineers focused on building an automated regression suite for the core payment flows. Over the following five months, as coverage extended to reconciliation, refunds and third-party integration testing, the team grew to nine, including a test automation lead who now owns the CI pipeline's test gating rules alongside the client's own lead engineer. The team works as an extension of the client's own engineering squad inside the same sprint cycle, same ticketing system and same daily stand-ups, rather than as a separate handover-based testing function.

Offshore delivery from Hanoi, Vietnam, embedded inside the client's own sprint cadence and CI pipeline.

Because the product is a regulated payments platform, test data handling was a specific design point rather than an afterthought. The QA team does not use real customer payment data at any point: test cases run against synthetic transaction data and tokenised or masked card and account details generated for testing purposes only, so live customer payment information is never transferred to or processed by the offshore team. This kept the engagement outside the more sensitive categories of personal and financial information that would otherwise trigger a fuller APP 8 cross-border disclosure assessment, since no real customer data leaves Australia as part of the QA process. Where any incidental personal information is used in test planning or defect reporting, the same APP 8 reasonable-steps obligation applies, with the client retaining accountability for APP compliance regardless of where the testing work is performed. Corpshore's engineering and security practices are aligned with the Essential Eight framework.

Release cycle time is down by roughly 30 percent, with fewer late-cycle regressions forcing a slipped release date. Defect leakage into production, tracked as customer-reported issues per release, is down by about 40 percent since the automated regression suite reached full coverage. The client estimates its effective QA cost is down by around 48 percent compared with hiring an equivalent onshore team of senior test engineers and a dedicated automation lead, while getting broader coverage than its previous developer-led testing approach delivered.

Never touching real customer payment data was a design decision, not a compromise, and it is what let a regulated payments business bring an offshore QA team as close to its core product as it did.