Scroll to learn more arrow
photo
By: Julia Nasy
24 Feb. 2023

How to Build a Fintech App

15 mins read
Post image

Fintech apps are becoming increasingly popular as they allow people to manage their money easily. They’re user-friendly and offer more features than traditional banking apps. Today, financial technology is a profitable area that many entrepreneurs dream of becoming part of. And if you have been waiting for a long time to invest in fintech app development, it’s time.

With this article, you will teach about the main types of fintech solutions, how they work, crucial features, the advantages of fintech mobile apps, and how to build your digital banking product that will help to scale your business. This guide will walk you through everything you need to know to create a fintech app.

What is a FinTech App?

Fintech is software that combines banking and financial services, improving and automating them. Its primary goal is efficiently handling monetary processes and operations using the latest technologies and algorithms, such as blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI). Fintech solutions make mobile payments and money management easier: track spending, budget finances, and open bank accounts without visiting financial institutions. In addition, they are convenient, easy to use, and provide more features than traditional banking apps.

Fintech Mobile App Benefits

Today every second smartphone owner uses financial technology for daily tasks. But fintech apps are also popular choices for small businesses and entrepreneurs. Implementing new and advanced technology can increase your business revenue and provide your clients with more convenient management of their finances. Here’s the list of the most outstanding advantages for companies and customers that prove why you should start developing now.

Personalization

Data analytics solutions enable startups to track and respond to changing customer needs quickly. Due to this feature, businesses provide their clients with better online banking services and personalized products. It can, in turn, improve customer retention and loyalty.

Security

Fintech apps development is not possible without the most up-to-date and secure mobile technologies. Robust algorithms, two-factor authentication, facial features, voice recognition, and data encryption ensure improved security. This is a crucial moment, as fintech apps deal with sensitive data.

Convenience

A user-friendly interface of a fintech app makes it easier for your clients to manage finances than traditional banking websites. This feature is the secret behind the success of a product to some extent, as one of the leading fintech app goals is providing simple analytical tools for customers to organize financial data and transfer money.

Competitive Edge

A fintech app is a way to stay ahead of financial sector competitors. Well-designed fintech product provides a competitive advantage over traditional financial institutions. Do you want to conquer the market with your future fintech project? – Fill out this application form, and the Limestone Digital specialists will contact you shortly for further steps discussion.

Types of Fintech Apps

Fintech app development services help with various applications for different target audiences and purposes. It covers multiple use cases in B2B, B2C, and P2P markets. The following are the most promising types of fintech that are changing the financial industry now.

Investment Apps

These fintech mobile apps are mainly focused on inexperienced users. They provide valuable insights about cryptocurrency and tips from experts. Complex fintech solutions help to start investing with just a few dollars and figure out how the market works. In short, such apps make investment more accessible than ever.

Investment apps like Robinhood and Acorns are good choices for newbies who need help investing substantial money. They offer portfolio management, rapid stock trading, and trades processing using innovative technology and a user-friendly interface.

Personal Finance Apps

Such apps work as automated financial advisors, facilitating budgeting, accounting, and management. They gather users’ financial information in one place, help track spending habits, get used to saving, plan budgets, and make sound financial decisions. To start using the personal financial management (PFM) app, you need to set a financial goal and connect various bank accounts to the app dashboard. With the help of PFM apps, users also can generate custom financial reports, schedule recurring payments, and track international expenses, forgetting about conversion rates.

Personal finance management application reveals trends and opportunities. For example, it detects where users spend the most money based on their daily transactions and suggests ways to save. It can also tell how much you need to cut back to pay off a debt by a specific date.

No wonder personal finance management apps are so popular today. According to statistics, more than half of smartphone users have at least one app to manage their finances. And such applications as Mint, You Need a Budget, and Spendee сonfidently occupy this niche.

Lending Apps

The loan apps facilitate the lending process and enable users to lend money without involving a bank or credit institution or engaging with loan brokers. They connect the lender and the borrower directly and manage the whole procedure, from loan requests to payments. When lenders can’t get a complete picture of their applicants, loan apps give them access to the users’ shared info such as bank, payroll, and other data they need to make decisions. And it’s easy to verify borrowers’ identity and authenticate their accounts.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) lending apps usually concentrate on reducing operational costs to offer more attractive terms than traditional banks. Other key P2P lending features:

  • auto investment for lenders;
  • credit score to automatically calculate the borrower’s creditworthiness;
  • loan calculator to quickly and accurately predict monthly payments;
  • loan application matching to find the most suitable lender automatically.

Today, lending apps became a reliable source of emergency cash for short-term users’ needs. And such popular fintech startups as Plaid, Dave, and Prosper, boosted by the pandemic, continue to expand their network of partners and customers exponentially.

Insurance Apps

InsureTech is one of the fastest-growing types of financial applications. Its value is expected of $1.19 billion by the next five years. Insurance apps connect insurers and the insured by allowing users to get fast help and choose the most suitable plan. They provide various types and purposes such as life, health, travel, car, etc.

Moreover, insurance companies have benefits and get closer contact with their clients. They can simplify claims management, provide easy access to insurance policies, automate payments and offer 24/7 customer support. For instance, Oscar, one of the most famous American insurance startups, allows its clients to search for a doctor, book an appointment, and view laboratory test results.

Regtech Apps

This is a relatively new market. Financial service companies use such applications to help their customers with regulatory compliance. It’s essential in banking, insurance, and other financial industry sectors.

Regulatory compliance technology helps to track tasks, regulatory changes, transactions, and reporting on the analytics dashboard. It also includes identity and risk management and fraud detection. Regtech solutions often use AI and Data Science to structure and analyze massive amounts of financial data. For example, IdentityMind Global startup uses Graph Intelligence and Machine Learning algorithms to identify risks, assess payment behavior, and combat fraud.

But the fintech market is wider than the above categories. There are many other types of fintech apps, such as Wealthtech, bank apps we all know, tax management applications, electronic payments apps, and more. They impact the industry and change the world, raising millions of investments.

Fintech Mobile App Key Features

  • Gamification is a new trend in software development. This tool allows fintech companies to increase users’ engagement and achieve the goals they set. It motivates customers to take actions that benefit both the startup and app clients.
  • Blockchain and cryptocurrency have become driving forces in the fintech industry. They change the way of storing data and sharing information. Authentication and logging guarantee the authenticity of each transaction. Blockchain technology protects against identity theft, as all users have access to their encrypted data. It also helps to build trust among business partners and reduce transaction fees.
  • Biometric Security is in high demand. The more security fintech applications have, the more secure clients feel when using them.
  • A chatbot is the most modern technology. It can track users’ investment and spending history to provide valuable financial insights, remind them of payment deadlines, give financial transaction alerts, answer balance questions, and more. This is substantial assistance in making critical monetary decisions.
  • Data visualization contributes to user retention. It includes various comprehensive charts with the leading monthly events and procedures, for example, pictured monetary transactions.
  • Notifications bring a lot of advantages for your business, as they increase conversion rates, help to retain users, and track metrics. Push notifications are a crucial part of any app. Using them, you can inform clients about any changes, encouraging them to open your application and get more information.
  • Machine Learning and AI are not newbies in the fintech industry, and today they’re essential elements of each good fintech app. These tools are powerful, as they allow you to identify associations between various factors and make predictions.

Related reading: Fintech App Development Cost: How to Keep Your Budget in Check

Fintech Mobile App Development: Step-by-Step Guide

So you decided to build a successful fintech startup or grow your business with financial app help. But software development is technically challenging, so hiring a professional team with experience in developing fintech apps, such as Limestone Digital specialists, is worth considering. Book a free call with one of our experts to know all details of the development process and get a head start on your project now. But there’s still time before an appointment, let’s quickly go through the main steps of app development.

Step 1: Determine Niche

First, you need to brainstorm and validate business ideas from a perspective before starting to build a fintech app. Your team should determine the area you wish to operate and spend some time researching. It gives you an understanding of an appropriate niche, required technologies, target market, and its needs.

There are some key factors to determine the target audience: gender, age, location, preferences, habits, etc. Use popular methods, such as various social media analytics tools, Google Analytics, or Google Search Console, to research effectively.

Step 2: Define Key Features

Once you clarify everything from your end, it’s time to define future fintech app features based on your chosen industry and demographic. Some fintech app essential elements you can find in this article above. But you don’t need to stuff your digital banking solution with many newfound ideas to create a fintech app that would be successful. It’s enough to do market research and present something more innovative, faster, cheaper, and user-friendlier for the fintech sector.

Step 3: Ensure Legal Requirements

Your future fintech solution must be legally sound. Remember that every country has unique legal requirements, and your application must comply with many privacy laws determined by the countries your product is designed for.

Users’ financial data must be kept secure, as there is always a chance that hackers will steal clients’ personal information. Below you can find some points related to legal compliance you should explore and implement before the fintech app launching.

  • Check the legal agreements for using customers’ financial data.
  • Generate data privacy and management policy of fintech application.
  • Prepare an insurance policy for accidental breaches.
  • Create a backup.

Step 4: Select Tech Stack

Selecting a technology stack is a crucial part of fintech app development. In case of a wrong choice, you can waste your time and budget. The first option is native app development, which means building separate solutions for Android and IOS. Native apps have smooth performance and excellent user experience, but their building is relatively expensive and time-consuming.

But there is one more option – cross-platform development. Your team will have to write just one codebase for both iOS and Android. The cross-platform app is the most time- and cost-effective decision because you need only a small software development team who can build a fintech app quickly.

Step 5: UI/UX Design

Designers are as crucial as a development team because fintech apps users appreciate application appearance no less than its functionality. You’ve already read about the user-friendly functions above and know that the user account should be practical and useful. Here are some more helpful tips:

  • avoid interface filling of unnecessary features;
  • all essential functions should be readily available on the dashboard;
  • remember that users know nothing about coding but appreciate a nice picture that goes with simplicity and transparency.

Step 6: Develop a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

Now, when you go through the steps above, you’re ready to build a minimum viable product using all these components. MVP is the basic version of a future application that includes its fundamental features. Its primary goal is to test a mobile banking app before launching. You can’t create a fintech app and skip this critical step in the development process.

MVP is focused on a group of customers who are more forgiving and likely to give constructive feedback. Users’ reactions will highlight weaknesses and features you need to add later. You’ll also need mobile analytics to collect data and learn user behavior. All these actions reduce costs and risks, help to gain users’ early traction, and attract new investors.

Step 7: Test Your App

Before the app launching, you need extensive testing. This will help you detect any shortcomings and remove most of the bugs. This process includes app testing on different devices. The Beta version can be available only for your colleagues or local customers. Your application should be tested with all the essential tools. If it is bug-free, your app is ready to launch officially.

Step 8: Consistently Improving

Remember that improving is an essential part of any successful fintech app. Because new innovative technologies appear daily, you must regularly update and adapt your app. Enhancing your digital banking product should be based on users’ feedback, complaints, and requests. Collect them, give appropriate answers, run checks and take immediate actions to fix any glitches or errors. Finally, support the progress because improving the mobile app will help you scale your business.

It's a Great Time for Building a Fintech App

When you finally know how to build a fintech app and make it successful, it’s time to think about your project. And you need an experienced development team, so let’s develop your fintech solution together! Limestone Digital company offers a free 30-minute consultation to discuss your idea and share more about the development and maintenance costs of building mobile apps. Our experts would be ideal partners to help you achieve your business goals.

Content