A Complete Guide to Fintech App Development

Fintech is taking global industries by storm, revolutionizing the way businesses are conducted. This change is getting more intense with the acute challenges of the global COVID-19 pandemic that demands a fast response from every industry (including FinTech).

The UK offers one of the most promising landscapes for this thriving industry combining world-class expertise, best-in-class approaches to regulation, access to capital, and an innovative mindset. This has put the UK at the centre of fintech innovation, bringing some of the most significant business investments in peer-to-peer lending, insurtech, blockchain, and more. They are delivering excellent client-centric applications, services, and solutions.

Despite this, there are few confusions around how to build fintech applications, what they encompass and more. To clear the air, our experts have combined their industry insights in this blog.

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Let’s start discovering them one by one.

What is a Fintech Application?

Fintech or Financial Technology describes the applications that aim to improve and automate financial services at the core. These solutions leverage advanced technologies and algorithms to help enterprises, owners, and consumers seamlessly manage financial operations and processes.

Although it encompassed only backend systems for financial enterprises when introduced in the 21st century, it is closely related to consumer-grade applications. Therefore, it now extends beyond traditional applications to industries such as education, retail banking, fundraising, nonprofit, and investments. It also incorporates the development of crypto-currency applications such as bitcoin.

What are the Types of Fintech Applications?

As discussed, Fintech applies to multiple industries and help consumers as well as enterprises to carry out seamless financial services and operations. Let’s discuss some most popular types of Fintech applications:

1. Insurance Applications

As the name suggests, insurance applications serve as a bridge between insurance organizations and consumers. Helping consumers to make faster claims, these applications include cutting-edge features like claims filing, filter-based policy search, payment processing, and a lot more.

2. Investment Mobile App

Loved by investors, these applications allow them to make stock purchases and help drive decisions that optimise profits. Users can leverage these applications for stock trading, mutual funds, and cryptocurrency trading. Investments applications are mostly known for the features: asset search, invest in assets, credits management, asset comparison, real-time notifications, and much more.

3. Digital Payments

Digital payment platforms allow consumers to pay for the goods and services to the vendors seamlessly. At the same time, these applications benefit business owners to receive payments directly to their bank accounts without compromising on security. Users can also send or receive money from other bank accounts or carry out banking activities using these applications. Some popular features of digital payment applications include: register bank accounts, verify bank accounts, carry out transactions via various modes like UPI, NEFT, etc., pay bills or schedule them.

4. Regtech Applications

Regtech or Regulatory compliance technology helps enterprises to comply with law states by regulatory bodies. These apps help monitor tasks, regulatory changes, transactions, reporting and a lot more, in addition to keeping a check on false non-compliance alerts.

5. Money Lending Applications

The loan lending applications allow you to lend money without involving any financial or credit organization or even having one to participate in long conversations with the loan brokers. Once registered on the application, users can share the details upon which they can avail of certain loans based on their credit score. These applications offer features such as credit score, loan application, bill payments, etc.

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How to Develop Fintech Application?

Fintech application development is slightly different from building applications of various other types. There are multiple challenges along the way, as well as many things to take care of, the most important of which is compliance. At Matellio, we offer our clients a comprehensive fintech app development experience that takes care of everything. Let’s highlight our process for you:

1. Choose the Right Niche

As you know, fintech applications are of multiple types. You need to make an intelligent decision before investing in fintech app development (unless you have carefully considered a niche with your business goals in mind). If not, our team will get on board in your journey and start with the pre-development phase, where we’ll analyse your target audience, goals, and challenges you want to address.

This will not just make the picture clear but will also guide our decisions in the right direction. Once we have a clear understanding of the niche, we can dig into the competitors to know various aspects of their offerings, such as:

• Application availability
• Features and USP
• Pain points they address and don’t
• Aspects they lack

And more.

The result of this brainstorming will be clear- the development of a fintech application that touches the horizons of popularity.

2. Fulfil the Compliance Requirements

Fintech applications must be compliant with the latest industry requirements and regulations. Failure to satisfy even a single one can land you into big trouble-causing all your investments to go down the drain and, of course, extensive damage to your reputation.

Multiple financial protection systems such as KYC, AML, and more are designed to track these compliance requirements. At the same time, you need to comply with privacy laws such as CCPA, GDPR, LGPD, PIA to ensure the right security parameters that help you win the trust of your users.

As an aspiring Fintech business owner in the UK, you need to fulfil multiple other compliance requirements. It would be wise to take a look at them here.

3. Shortlist the Features of the Fintech App

While features to include in Fintech App depend on the niche you would like to take, let’s help you understand the must-have features.

1. Secure Login

Security is one of the most significant requirements when it comes to fintech applications. Given the level of data sensitivity, fintech applications rely on cybersecurity more than ever. This makes having a robust security infrastructure to support the fintech applications a must-have to battle the challenges. Security should be embedded at every level of the fintech application, right from the Login. Ensure your users are protected by top-notch security parameters such as fingerprint locks, facial locks, or voice recognition before carrying out any financial transaction or even logging in.

2. Push Notifications

Push notifications are a fantastic way to keep your users engaged and updated about the app’s various ongoings. These updates will also help your users stay on top of their financial news such as balance, failed or pending transactions, and more. Although there is a limitation to implementing push notifications in the Fintech industry, it has been reported that these are some of the most valued features for users.

3. Budget Tracking and Savings

Whether a great financial planner or your users, everyone needs a little support while tracking their budget and ensuring they end the month with some savings. The best you can do is- enable them to do so on the application option you are offering. Help them track their daily spending and scope of savings. This would go a long way in helping you build a great user base and, most importantly, a user base that has loyal customers to its kitty.

4. Financial Operations

This is a no-brainer here. What is a fintech application without its core features? Based on the niche you choose; you would want to consider one or more of the following features:

• Transfer money
• Make or receive digital payments
• Connect bank accounts
• Check balance
• Wealth management
• Access and pay bills
• Personal finance features

And much more.

To know which features best align with your goals and challenges, reach out to our team and leverage our decades of experience.

5. Virtual assistant or an AI-powered Chatbot

AI is ubiquitous today and embedded into our very lifestyle. No one really wants to go through multiple website pages or app screens just to find the answer to specific queries. All they do is call our Alexa, and everything is right there under their fingertips. How can the fintech industry be different?

If you want to create consumer-focused applications that users love, you need to create something they would want to use. Give them access to virtual assistance or AI-based chatbots to sought out their queries or use features of your applications- all without compromising with security.

6. Personalisation

Personalization is the key to success today. Although most industries are already leveraging personalization to boost the user experience, Fintech is slightly behind. You don’t have to be one among them. You could think of embedding personalization in marketing based on user preferences. This way, you can optimise your marketing budget by guiding it where most people are likely to make a purchase.

7. Financial Reporting

If you think financial reporting is only crucial to you as a business, you need to think again. Last, your consumers want is to end up in a situation where they exhaust their monthly budget in the middle of the month only to wait for their salaries to be credited. A comprehensive reporting system will keep this at bay as well as contribute to the app usability. Ensure that your users can track their budget and make an informed decision based on monthly or weekly reports to optimise their spending.

4. Finalise the Team Structure

Once you have the basics sorted, it’s time to finalize the team that would realize your on-paper plans to full-fledged fintech applications. At Matellio, we recommend having the following resources on your team:

• Business analysts
• Front-end developers
• Backend developers
• Designing experts
• Project manager
• QA specialist

You can also hire more resources or decrease the team size based on your requirements.

5. Designing the Fintech Application

Designing combined with the best features can help you stand out from the crowd. However, designing Fintech applications is not the same as designing applications for any other niche. Fintech users are different, and with a preference for security, you need to give them an experience that matches their expectations. Let’s help you highlight the key takeaways we garnered from Matellio’s design team when asked on things to consider while designing fintech applications:

• Keep it simple. Don’t overwhelm your users with complex elements that are not accessible to them.
• Do not compromise with security. Make sure it is embedded into each layer of the design aspect.
• Focus on delivering a seamless experience, no matter which device your users are using.
• Leverage micro-interactions to reduce complexity
• Test every single element from font style to font colour to elements colour. If anything doesn’t look right to your audience, be flexible to change.

6. Fintech MVP Development

MVPs are not only suitable business investments but also essential to make the most of your efforts. With MVPs, you can start small and grow big while making your app suitable to meet the consumers’ demands. Having just basic features, an MVP is a prototype of the final product.

7. Quality Analysis and Launch

No development process is complete without quality analysis. Having the best QA team across the UK, we offer multiple types of testing methodologies that ensure our deliverable quality is par excellence. Our testing methodology includes the following steps:

• Decide the feature to explore
• Analyse the feature purpose
• Create user stories, including acceptance criteria
• Create a test case from the user story
• Generate test run to validate the user story

Once the application passed the QA stage successfully, it is approved by the client, after which it is launched for the users to download.

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Are You Looking for a Fintech App Development Company?

Matellio’s experts are excited to help you. Having decades of experience in building cutting-edge fintech applications, we are chosen for our expertise combined with a client-centric process that ensures optimal client satisfaction. Our comprehensive range of fintech development services allow you to build highly efficient FinTech solutions to improve agility, cost leadership and operational efficiency:

• AI-powered customer engagement applications
• Finance IoT solutions
• Big data and analytics finance apps
• Blockchain-based finance applications
• Custom fintech solutions

Unable to find something that you were looking for? Reach out to our team, and indeed, we’ll be able to cater to it. Try us by sharing your requirements.

Originally published at https://www.matellio.co.uk/ on August 24, 2021