The financial technology industry (fintech) is one of the world’s most competitive and fast-developing industries. It has emerged as a response to the consumers’ needs for simple, secure, and fast financial transactions. Financial apps provide helpful tools and resources for peer-to-peer money transfers, e-banking, insurance, investments, and so on. What is more, the fintech sector has not been drastically affected by the pandemic. On the contrary, it has been growing at an even more rapid pace to satisfy social distancing requirements and facilitate the adoption of contactless payments.

Thinking about building a fintech app? Check our article to find everything you need to know to start implementing your idea. We will cover the following topics:

– Types of financial software solutions
– Must-have features for financial apps
– Steps for successful financial app development
– Crunch case study in financial software development
– Cost of financial app development

Types of financial software solutions

To start building a software solution for the financial technology industry, it is important that you get well-informed about various areas of fintech. To help you get an insight into up-to-date financial market trends, we have prepared a list of the most popular types of financial applications. All of them are aiming to reach a certain objective and solve the needs of financial companies or facilitate money management activities. Among them are the following:

  • Online banking apps. Allow users to keep track of their spending, pay bills, transfer money, apply for loans, and more.
  • Personal finance apps. Allow users to manage their overall finances. These apps can connect with the users’ bank account and help keep up with their spending or credit score.
  • Tax assistance apps. Help users fill in their tax forms using templates. With the help of AI, more innovative solutions can suggest the proper amount of taxes that the users should pay for a reporting period.
  • Accounting software. Assists accountants in recording and reporting the company’s financial transactions and keeping track of expenses and profits. This type of financial software is used by all enterprises.
  • Budgeting and forecasting software. Helps companies plan the financial resources that they need to support their businesses in the future as well as evaluate the risks of making an investment.
  • Online payment solutions. Enable secure and fast money transfers as well as transactions between customers and vendors without disclosing their financial details.
  • Lending software. Helps handle loan requests and facilitate interaction between the borrower and the lender.
  • Investment software. Allows investors investigate and invest in various financial assets as well as improve their investment performance by providing relevant analytics and data.

Must-have features for financial apps

Regardless of the main goal of your solution, there are certain features that are nice to have for every financial app. They include the following:

  • Simple and secure sign-in: combine a two-factor authentication with a fingerprint authentication or face recognition.
  • Main financial transactions: money transfers, digital payments, or deposits.
    Personalized notifications: let your users decide what information they want to receive.
  • Chatbots and virtual assistants: help your users find any information they need at any time. In addition, this feature will reduce the load on your customer service department.
  • QR code and card number scanner: make user experience even more pleasant and engaging by allowing your users to scan the card number instead of manually entering it. The QR code scanner is a useful tool that allows access to any information stored in a QR code.

Steps for successful financial app development

The process of developing a successful software solution for fintech involves several important steps, which we are going to cover in detail in this section.

  • Identify your target market and outline the solution concept.

First you have to conduct a market research and a competitor analysis to find out what is popular among your target users. Identify what problems or inconveniences they are experiencing in their current financial application, and then generate ideas on how your solution will help resolve those issues.
We suggest that you work with competent Business Analysts through this step to develop comprehensive business requirements and define the feature set and workflows. The outcomes will help you define what features must be available in your solution.

  • Design an easy-to-use and engaging interface.

The look and feel of the interface play a crucial role in user adoption of the solution. Our experienced UI/UX Designers will conduct user interviews and develop interactive prototypes to validate design concepts and demonstrate real-life scenarios for your app.

  • Prepare a development plan.

Now when you have detailed project requirements and designs in place, it is time to collaborate with Project Managers and Tech Leads to define the technological stack, implementation constraints, and development plan, including time and costs estimates.

  • Build a minimum viable product (MVP).

Before starting a long-term project, check whether your potential project solves the users’ problems. To do this, develop an MVP that includes must-have features that define your solution’s value proposition. Also, with an MVP, you can gather early feedback to make sure that the product brings the expected benefits to users.

  • Develop, support, and maintain the product.

As you get feedback from the users, you can improve your solution by adding new features. To make your financial app perform well, further support, maintenance, and updating of features is needed. Crunch has a wide expertise in building complex financial solutions. Working together, we can develop innovative and secure solutions for finance.

Finding the right software development company is a prerequisite for successful implementation of your idea. We recommend contracting a software development company that provides a full cycle of software development services and has a proven track record of building products for finance, such as Crunch. Check our case study about the payment management platform in the next section.

Crunch case study in financial software development

One of our example projects in fintech is an FX and payments management platform. It is available on any device and allows the clients to create their accounts to manage all international cash flows. The platform supports IBAN, SEPA payments, and SWIFT transfers.

Crunch team has contributed to the development and support of the following platform features:

      • Multiple currency wallets to store currencies until there is a need to make a payment or currency exchange. The client can have an unlimited number of wallets in any of the supported currencies.
      • Visualizations of the complete cost of foreign exchange operations in advance to provide fully transparent and competitive pricing.
      • Customizable dashboards to get all the key data needed for making informed decisions.
      • Automation and optimization of foreign exchange operations using foreign exchange scenarios and triggers for execution.
      • Data for analytics and reporting: market data, rate alerts, portfolio performance, and more.

From the security standpoint, the solution offers data protection, backup, and encryption. All actions in the platform are logged and saved, ensuring a full audit trail with continuous backups.

All in all, the solution brings technological innovation to corporate finance and provides business access to all financial services needed to run international treasury operations.

Cost of financial app development

The cost of financial app development is determined by the amount and complexity of features, the technologies that you would like to use, and hourly rate of your development team. The more complicated your solution is, the bigger is the cost to develop it.

The hourly rate varies from country to country. The average rates for development services are as follows:

  1. The USA and Canada – $50-200
  2. India – $10-50
  3. Western Europe – $60-150
  4. Eastern Europe (Ukraine) – $30-40

Crunch provides its development services at $25-49, depending on the solution complexity and the number of specialists involved in the project. Keep in mind that the final cost can be lower or higher depending on your project and its goals. An approximate cost of building a financial app at Crunch is $30-50k. To get a detailed estimate, book a short call with us today.

Conclusion

The financial technology industry is continually expanding, changing, and adapting to the demands for greater personalization and automation. We can help you harness the power of modern technologies to predict the consumer needs and identify new business opportunities. Check our case studies related to financial software development to learn more about our experience. Contact us any time to get more detailed information on our services.

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