These days, FinTech attracts heavy investment: from $12.7 billion in 2020 to $23.4 billion in 2021. This means a significant shift in the financial industry structure, calling businesses to introduce cutting-edge technologies to remain competitive.
Given the capabilities of FinTech solutions, this change is for good, promising better ways for people to manage their money.
In this overview, we’ll reveal the key technology opportunities and share our experience on how to build secure FinTech applications.
FinTech App Potential and Adoption
Companies choose to build FinTech app solutions to simplify and increase the effectiveness of financial operations with a diversified set of high-tech solutions.
Currently, the secure FinTech industry encapsulates the set of various technologies, including payment processing, digital wallets, and lending services.
In addition to providing functionality to manage sensitive information, these automation tools have improved the efficiency of managing business processes. And these benefits reach far beyond the limits of traditional banking.
3 Key Ways FinTech Solutions Are Applied to Mobile Apps:
- Adding financial features to non-financial apps. Now, each business owner can process in-app transactions.
- App monetization. Secure FinTech services made the appearance of the Freemium model possible, meaning the presence of paid features in a generally free mobile app.
- Meeting customer demands. Already existing and new technologies make banking apps in the customers’ eyes more effective and secure.
As the leading trends in Fintech application development, artificial intelligence, blockchain, gamification, bots, and voice technologies shape the future of innovation. All of them possess the power to reinforce your business performance and customer experience even more.
FinTech Use Cases
These days, FinTech applications are very popular and serve the financial needs of various industries, including banks, insurance, and eCommerce.
Erica
Bank of America decided to build a FinTech app to enable mobile banking for their clients. Serving as a virtual financial assistant, this mobile solution has a diversified set of features:
- View all your bonuses in one place
- Check your balances across the accounts
- Get a weekly snapshot of your month-to-date spending
- Locate past transactions across accounts
- Receive notifications on refunds
- Monitor recurring changes
- Receive bill reminders and schedule payments
- Get alerts when duplicate changes occur
- Check important credit score changes
All-in-all, this solution facilitates everyday banking and provides personalized and proactive insights to support financial activity.
Lemonade
This FinTech app provides instant access to a diversified set of insurance services. The set of features includes claims, giveback, and policy 2.0. Handled by AI tools, claim management allows filing claims quickly and hassle-free. All you need to do is to press a “Claims” button, tell the app what’s happened, and let AI run its anti-fraud algorithms to instantly approve this claim or send it to the team.
Giveback is a service that lets customers choose a nonprofit organization to care for and send unclaimed money that is left. All you need is to sign Lemonade Policy, a radically simplified, modernized, and digitized insurance policy.
Shopify
As an eCommerce platform, Shopify adopts FinTech instruments to ensure safe payment processing in the system. This company is a striking representative of non-financial players that start offering financial services without leaving their industry. The term that represents this trend is “embedded finance.“
In essence, Shopify provides infrastructure for other eCommerce companies, including in-built FinTech solutions for trading. In particular, the platform has Facebook Shop integration and provides installment payments to clients who buy for the price between $50 and $1,000.
This way, the ability to offer secure and efficient financial services with FinTech tools generates profits and creates revenue growth for the company.
Development Tips: How to Create an Outstanding FinTech App
Normally, the FinTech application development process consists of these stages:
- Product concept. The development process starts with defining your product, along with determining its purpose, researching the market, and calculating the possible risks.
- Vendor selection. Once you know what you do, it’s time to answer the question, “Who?”. At this stage, check the resource base of each vendor carefully to make sure this company can become your reliable tech partner in the long run.
- Technology stack choice. Selecting the exact set of technologies for developing FinTech apps depends on the expertise of the team and your budget limitations, among other factors. Make sure your choice has true value for money.
- UI/UX design. The main focus of a FinTech app is to ensure the most satisfactory customer experience. It’s important that the design has full functionality and presents all these features in an easy-to-use manner.
- MVP development. This product helps to test your product idea by investing a minimum in the app development itself. What’s more, you will get customer feedback right away and develop software so that it addresses their needs more accurately in the future.
In the FinTech app building process, it’s important to make wise decisions and consider all the opportunities in each development stage.
For example, the ideation stage should go beyond corporate brainstorming and include in-depth research, like PwC best practices. Moreover, MVP development isn’t effective without sufficient testing before the release.
From our development practice, going for outsourcing is the best choice in terms of cost-effectiveness and quality standards. These days, software development outsourcing is rising, meaning the ability to provide enhanced experience with AI and IoT, work with blockchain services, and stick to the highest cybersecurity standards.
Nevertheless, it’s important to make an informed decision about your tech partner and be aware of all the possible risks and pitfalls in your cooperation.
5 Main Features for Building a Fintech App
- API integration. It’s essential to link your FinTech app to other applications to guarantee a satisfactory level of user experience.
- Chatbots. Combined with AI capabilities, this technology provides customers with essential and accurate support and maintains this service 24/7.
- Notifications. The financial sphere is dynamic and constantly updated. Without the notifications feature, they will miss important news or have doubts about whether the transaction was successful.
- Security. FinTech apps deal with sensitive information, and it’s crucial to introduce at least a two-factor authentication defense for customers.
3 Core Tips to How to Build a Secure FinTech Application
Generally, the development of the FinTech industry has improved the security standards for mobile apps. That’s because the safety layer is the key one for FinTech apps.
Unfortunately, not every tech vendor is aware of it: most developers prefer to copy the quick solution from StackOverflow or introduce already existing crypto algorithms. That’s how buggy software has flooded the market.
In the given circumstances, FinTech security is one of the strongest ones in the mobile app development market. Below, you will find the exact things to do to make secure FinTech solutions.
1. Payment Gateway Protection
Providing a safe payment gateway is a must-have measure for secure FinTech development. Being a technology that collects and transfers data from a client to an acquirer, it acts as an interface between a merchant’s website and its acquirer.
In other words, it deals with sensitive personal information that should be protected accordingly. Among must-have measures, your Fintech app development company should add SSL for secure connections, have a PCI certificate, enable tokenization, and provide 3D secure authentication.
2. Dedicate Enough Time to Testing
Also, FinTech security comes as a result of passing a sufficient number of checks and validation. In the software development process, they happen in the testing stage. Being titled “penetration testing,” this set of measures is aimed at detecting vulnerabilities in the app and contributing to creating an attach-resistant code.
The effectiveness of this step depends heavily on a clear understanding of the app security requirements. Besides, QA testers should work through every possible scenario during functional testing. That’s why the professionalism of these team members is crucial in FinTech development.
3. Invest in IT Security as a Whole
Finally, it’s impossible to maintain FinTech security in a vulnerable IT ecosystem in the long run. That’s why it’s important to develop a defensibility approach, meaning the creation of a safe cyber environment as a whole.
In this context, the list of key measures includes leveraging a robust IT infrastructure, building secure application logic, ensuring web-server security, and writing secure code.
Intellectsoft Will Help You with FinTech Application Development
Ask us for help! Intellectsoft is a Fintech app development company that offers a wide range of financial software development solutions:
- Online banking: Create a state-of-art banking solution for your end-users, including custom platforms, mobile apps, security, UI/UX, and system integration.
- Blockchain and cryptocurrencies: Ask for solutions and platforms to increase services’ security, reduce transaction fee expenditure, and automate operations.
- Digital wallet: The range of well-made wallet apps that enable P2P payments, digital payments and money transfers, and in-app currency.
- AI and ML: Adopt cutting-edge technologies to build effective, automated, and highly accurate systems for delivering financial services.
- Trading and securities: Invest in securities trading, digital brokerage, blockchain ledgers, and AI automation with us.
- Robotic Process Automation (RPA): Enhance productivity, drive down costs, and streamline compliance with this intelligent automation solution.
Let Intellectsoft be your secure FinTech development partner! Speed up innovation using the power of our banking and financial services. Intellectsoft is eager to advance your efficiency, improve customer experience, and skyrocket business performance with future-proof technologies. Contact us now!
