Financial technology, known as fintech, is a rapidly growing industry disrupting traditional financial services. Fintech has enabled the development of innovative financial products and services that are more efficient, convenient, and accessible than traditional financial services. The fintech industry is projected to continue its growth trajectory, with global fintech revenues expected to grow to more than $200 billion in 2024.
One of the most significant trends in the fintech industry is application development. How to make a fintech app? Such applications offer a seamless and convenient way for users to manage their finances, invest, and make payments. Fintech apps have become essential for consumers and businesses, offering mobile banking, investing, budgeting, and peer-to-peer payment features. Since fintech app development can be puzzling for relative newcomers, the benefits are vast. This guide will walk you through the essential steps and answer the question of how to build a fintech app. Let’s dive in.
Before reviewing the crucial steps that form the fintech mobile app development, it’s also essential to check the types of solutions developed by fintech companies. Some may wonder – what is a fintech application, and how to release it to the market? Currently, the most common app types include digital banking, payment, investment and trading, digital wallets, insurance, and financial management solutions. With such a comprehensive variety of solutions, the development framework stays pretty much the same. In particular, each application has to include a dashboard, payment gateway, security, and other relevant features based on the app type. Still, the development framework consists of the following steps:
Let’s review each step and highlight the specific details relevant to financial organizations.
Research and planning. Before you start developing your fintech app, conducting thorough research and planning is essential. This stage will help you define your app’s features, target audience, and technology stack.
It’s also important to conduct market research. The first step to developing a successful fintech app is understanding your target market. You should conduct market research to identify user needs, preferences, and pain points. Your research should include analyzing your competitors and identifying gaps in the market that your app can fill.
Define your app’s features and functionalities. Once you’ve identified your target market’s needs, you can define your app’s features and functionalities. You can use your market research data to create a list of must-have features and additional features that would add value to your product. Also, when companies ask: “How much does it cost to launch a fintech app?” the cost varies depending on the core functionalities. Some possible app functionalities can include features such as mobile banking, investing, budgeting, and peer-to-peer payments.
Choose the right technology stack. Sticking to a particular tech stack is crucial to developing a robust and scalable fintech app. The technology stack comprises the programming languages, frameworks, and tools that you’ll use to build your app. Your choice of technology stack should align with your app’s functionalities, scalability, and security requirements. For this purpose, you should consult a fintech technology expert to help you choose the right technologies for your app.
Determine a project plan and timeline. After outlining your app’s features and technology stack, you can develop a project plan and timeline. Your project plan should outline the tasks of each development stage, milestones, and deadlines. When creating your project plan, you should also consider resource allocation, team roles, and budgeting factors.
Design and software development. Both design and development are crucial phases of building a fintech app and thus should be treated accordingly. On the design side, your remote team working on a project must handle the wireframe and prototype creation, then develop the user interface and experience. Also, the design department has to ensure that the fintech app is intuitive, easy to navigate, and visually appealing. When it comes to the development stage, your partner has to:
Launch and maintenance. Finally, once this project stage is ready, the team can proceed with the launch and maintenance stages. During this process, monitoring the app’s performance and gathering user feedback from the intended audiences is vital. Companies should consider rolling out new features for advanced applications to keep up with the market demands and emerging trends. On top of that, your tech vendor should follow the industry trends to ensure that your app’s security measures and compliance protocols are up to date to avoid potential regulatory issues.
Building a fintech app from scratch can challenge organizations looking to expand their operations in this booming market. While the design, development, and maintenance stages are comprehensive, the fundamental success path is to outline the business value of your application. In this sense, the first stage, which includes research and planning, is vital to reaching the intended results.
Developing a fintech app can be a challenging but rewarding process. Fintech apps offer a seamless and convenient way for users to manage their finances, invest, and make payments. The benefits of creating a fintech app include access to a vast and diverse customer base and potential revenue streams. To develop a successful fintech app, you must follow a comprehensive development process that includes research and planning, design, development, launch, and maintenance. You should conduct market research to identify user needs, define your app’s features and functionalities, choose the right technology stack, and develop a project plan and timeline.
If you want to speed up the development process and launch the fintech app of your dreams, partnering with us will help you source top-notch experts in the fintech field based in Central & Eastern Europe or Latin America. We will provide a highly motivated and skilled team so your fintech app can be kicked off and delivered under the specified timeline and technical nuances. Contact us.
From peer-to-peer payments and digital loans to Insurtech, cryptocurrency, and crowdfunding platforms – the Fintech industry is blooming. In a thriving market like this, a special place belongs to Fintech apps. More friendly and nimble than traditional financial services, they have secured their place in the daily routine of many people.
User-friendly, helpful, and secure Fintech apps always appeal to customers, even in a highly competitive market. This post addresses the question of how to build a Fintech app, including key steps and some essential elements of software development worth considering while building a Fintech app.
The process of building a Fintech app varies from company to company, but there are some steps you should take to end up with a secure and reliable Fintech app.
So, how to develop a Fintech app your users will love? Start by doing research – dive deeper into the market and identify less competitive segments. Going into a saturated market often requires coming up with new ways of creating value. Whichever strategy you choose, this step can be laborious, but it’s impossible to build a great Fintech product without thorough market and competitor research.
Market research will help you elaborate a concept of your Fintech product, including its key features. Some best practices here may include the SWOT analysis and user persona research. Based on this, you will decide on the type of gadgets (smartphone, tablet, or wearables) as well as the operating system(s) you will build your Fintech app for.
How to build a useful Fintech app? Such apps understand the customer and realize the problems they may face. The main question your market research should cover is how your app can help your users solve their problems. It’s a good idea to use the 5 Whys methodology, in which you can identify the needs of your target market by answering a set of questions. For example, you can start by answering the most general question: “Why do the users need your app?” The answer can be: To pay instantly. Then you follow with the next reasonable “Why:” “Why do they need to pay instantly?,” and so on. Answering a set of such questions can help you outline a slew of must-have features that will address your users’ pains.
How to develop a Fintech app properly? It’s important to select the right stack of tools, including technologies for the interface and server side as well as the types of APIs and databases you’re going to use. Choosing the wrong programming language or tools can negatively impact your app’s security, scalability, and performance. Moreover, given that Fintech apps gravitate towards mobile technologies, chances are you will be faced with the question of native vs. cross-platform development. You can go with native technologies (Swift or Objective-C, Java or Kotlin) when building a Fintech app for iOS and Android, respectively. Alternatively, you can apply cross-platform technologies (React, Flutter, Xamarin, etc) to build platform-agnostic solutions.
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The outcome of this step should be a detailed technology requirements documentation your team will use when building a Fintech app. It should outline the features of your app and delivery milestones. To create a proper document you will require Fintech development talent who knows how to build a Fintech app, which brings us to the next step.
Selecting a stack of technologies is only one part of building a Fintech app. This venture requires a diverse team to address all aspects of software development. Fintech apps have industry-specific architecture and compliance requirements, which makes the process different from developing any other kind of app. Sourcing developers with relevant skills and experience will benefit the entire process as they know the ins and outs of Fintech development.
As a company that builds Fintech teams (among other types of teams), we can say that it takes a coordinated team effort to build a Fintech app. For example, our team helped Encore Capital design and develop a debt management web platform and mobile app. Based on our experience, a full-fledged squad of Fintech application developers may include the following skillsets:
When it comes to building your tech unit, you can go with a local team or choose from other options that imply remote development, such as:
If you go with a team extension or a remote team model, nCube can help you make the most of it by sourcing Fintech application developers from Eastern Europe or Latin America.
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How to build a Fintech app and validate your idea fast? Use the MVP approach. A team of Fintech application developers will create the first versions of your Fintech app, which will help you test the waters and see early users’ reactions. Based on this, you will be able to identify and improve the logic of the app and resolve any inconsistencies before you move on to adding more features and building a full-blown version.
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Another critical question is how to develop a Fintech app properly. It’s impossible without testing its parts using various approaches. While the methods of Quality Assurance vary, they all share a common ground – to ensure that it functions properly and is understandable, secure, and easy to use.
How to develop a Fintech app and meet security regulations? The answer is security testing. With that in mind, your team of Fintech application developers and Quality Assurance specialists should prioritize identifying vulnerabilities and eliminating them early on.
Testing and improving a Fintech app is a continuous process that should be baked into your team’s daily routine. With that in mind, it’s best to automate Quality Assurance using a set of tools to get rid of the laborious process of manual app testing.
Another important aspect for the QA team to handle is load testing. It’s executed to ensure that what you’re building is a product that can fare well when the data volume increases unexpectedly. With load testing, your Fintech application developers will identify potential bottlenecks and eliminate them.
Chances are you’ll continue improving your Fintech app during its entire lifecycle. When the codebase is in flux, regression testing helps you to ensure that the Fintech app you’re building is secure each time the code is altered.
Fintech apps are associated with complex transactions, so checking if the database works correctly is a must. This kind of testing includes load testing to see how well the database can handle increasing volumes of data as your Fintech app scales.
Many Fintech apps are built for multiple operating systems, so it is crucial to test for compatibility with each. Be it an iOS, Android, or a cross-platform solution, your Quality Assurance team needs to ensure compatibility for all.
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The protection of the entire infrastructure is critical and should be made your priority. If your servers are hacked, your customer’s data is at risk of being stolen. Thus, taking care of your Fintech app’s security includes a mix of stringent protocols and cybersecurity measures, including the following:
Relying solely on the password strength of your users is not the wisest of security solutions. When building a Fintech app, it’s best to implement multi-level authentification (MFA): A process that requires the user to provide two or more verification factors to gain access to the app. Another reason is that the majority of security regulations declare MFA as a must to ensure a high level of compliance.
Like MFA, data encryption is a requirement when you address the question of how to build a Fintech app securely. Encryption protects the user’s data from prying eyes. Combined with other measures, it guarantees the utmost security, which also increases the trust of your users.
Using a combination of firewalls and antivirus solutions turns your app into Fort Knox. Modern firewalls are known for warding off all kinds of cyber threats. The infrastructure of your Fintech app should also be protected with a powerful antivirus solution so it doesn’t fall victim to viruses or spy programs.
Real-time monitoring ensures that you will react to the threat instantaneously, as opposed to hours without a real-time solution.
Building an effective and robust Fintech app requires using APIs, which may become a target for cybercriminals. To protect your APIs, it’s best to use a digital signature or authentication tokens and proactively detect and eliminate APIs vulnerabilities.
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Now that you’ve built your Fintech app, time for the final step – its launch. Your team of Fintech application developers will help you publish your app and optimize it for the app store of your choice so it reaches your market faster.
We believe that having a team who understands the nuts and bolts of Fintech is key to building a great Fintech app. nCube can help you set up an experienced and skilled unit of Fintech application developers. Let’s connect.
