How To Develop A Fintech App? A Complete Guide 2023

With new platforms and apps being introduced every day, the fintech sector is expanding at an unprecedented rate. In reality, the American area alone has the most fintech companies (11,651) up until May 2023, followed by the EMEA region (9,681) and the Asia Pacific region (5,061). The worldwide financial technology market is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of 20.3% to $698.48 billion by 2030, according to AlliedMarketResearch.

In this very dense market, gaining a competitive edge becomes a necessity. By tapping into fintech app development trends, you can fuel your mission to be unique in the market.

Imagine watching a hit movie where the tech-savvy hero looks for cutting-edge invention ideas that would enable him to achieve financial miracles. You begin to sway to his delights at that point, and your mind begins to race with endless thoughts and opportunities.

Fortunately, you don't have to be that movie hero! You can find the best mobile app development team, follow fintech app development best practises, and identify the right fintech app development ideas, features, and capabilities with the help of this blog's wealth of approaches and ideas. This will allow you to unleash your inner fintech superhero and take the financial world by storm.

So, hold onto your excitement as we are ready to start the learning process for developing fintech apps.

What is Fintech? And What is a Fintech App?

Fintech is a digital solution that combines financial operations with technological improvements to simplify managing finances and assets. In this context, a web, mobile, or desktop application that supports services like online banking, trading, budget management, digital payments, etc. is referred to as a "digital finance solution".

Fintech firms may develop new online financial services with the highest level of security and performance by using cutting-edge technology like AI/ML, Blockchain, and others.

In fact, Fintech applications are becoming the go-to products for tech-savvy customers like business owners, organisations, and banks that want to employ safe, dependable, scalable solutions that save them a tonne of time and effort when managing their funds. 

How is the future of finance being shaped by fintech?

Fintech undoubtedly has a significant impact on how the financial industry is shaped. The following are some of the breakthrough advantages and issues that fintech applications address for the financial sector and customers today:

Provides a variety of payment methods

Fintech innovation has given rise to a number of cutting-edge contactless payment options, including e-wallets, UPI, net banking, cryptocurrencies, and more. These new payment methods are exciting, but they also demand more security. However, you may use the cutting-edge technology at your disposal to increase the security of various payment methods.

Access to more financing options

With its cutting-edge products, fintech has revolutionised the lending industry. In the past, it was challenging for new companies and startups to get financing from conventional banks. But now that new fintech services like peer-to-peer lending platforms have emerged, they may borrow money more simply and even repay it more quickly.

Access to investment opportunities

The investing industry used to be quite established, and many people had difficulty getting access to it. However, the introduction of fintech apps has resulted in a significant change by making access easier and allowing users to hone their financial abilities. These applications are widely used, with Robinhood, Acorns, Coinbase, and many more as popular examples.

  

Common Types of Fintech Apps

 Digital banking Apps

Online banks that provide a rapid and practical way to handle banking tasks including checking balances, applying for loans, and more are referred to as providing digital banking services.

In order to compete in the market, not only fintech startups but also traditional banks are constructing mobile banking apps. These apps will provide a variety of online services to clients who are tech-savvy.

Furthermore, due to its dependability, mobile banking has established itself as a standard method for obtaining financial services.

Chime, Ally, and Starling are a some of the widely used mobile banking applications. 

Investment Apps

There was a period when buying stocks wasn't something that most people could do. Now that the financial sector has gone digital, anyone can quickly register a demat account, begin trading right away, and gain greater insights to determine what to invest in next. In a nutshell, you might say that it's now feasible to invest in equities both domestically and abroad, mutual funds, gold, and more.

This category includes robotic advice. These days, apps that employ machine learning algorithms are highly well-liked since they help users make the most of their investments by giving them data and risk-based investing recommendations.

Rich insight-based investment applications with a large worldwide following include Acorns, Robinhood, and Invstr. Moreover, widely used cryptocurrency trading applications include Binance, Coinbase, and WazirX. 

Lending/Loan Apps

They are exclusively designed with the consumer in mind, giving them instant loan access through conventional or peer-to-peer lending systems. Both conventional financial institutions and independent internet lenders have improved chances thanks to them.

These applications may have functions like billing, credit score checking, easy-to-fill application forms, additional offers/rewards, and more.

The most well-known applications in the loan and peer-to-peer lending categories include Dave, Earnin, PaySense, and Kiva. 

Personal Finance Apps 

There are many different kinds of personal financial applications, including those for budgeting, cost tracking, bill reminders, tax preparation, and credit monitoring.

They assist customers in managing their finances in a variety of ways, from teaching them by supplying insights and digital accounting procedures to offering tailored advice for efficient money management.

Popular personal money management applications include the budgeting apps Mint and PocketGuard as well as Personal Capital, a full-featured financial management tool. 

Top 6 Features You Can Include in Your Fintech App

1. Advanced login/sign in

2. Account management

3. Payment gateway

4. Push notifications

5. Transaction history

6. Chatbots 

4 Things to Consider When Building Your Pivotal Fintech App

• Security
• 3rd-party integrations
• Legal compliances
• Simplicity and usability 

A Step-by-step Guide to Building a Fintech App

We recognize how important your fintech app is to your company, how eager you are to construct it, and how eager you are to finish it without skipping a beat when it comes to features and functionality. Therefore, we've included all the steps you'll need here to create your own business-specific fintech app. Let's start with an outline of the evolution of fintech apps:

 

1. Define your fintech app development idea with market research

Finding the suitable problem to address the industry's challenges and your app's specialty before constructing any app is crucial to making your app a market leader from the start if it's created correctly. You can thus just respond to the following questions:

• What kind of fintech application do you want to create?
• What issues with fintech operations would it resolve? (Apps for personal money, investments, legal technology, online banking, or any other)

You may use this to determine your finance app specialisation. After you've finished researching your financial app topic, you're ready to move on to the in-depth user and market research for mobile apps.  

2. Do a UX research

You are now aware of your audience. So it's time to do in-depth audience research to learn about their pain spots, the features they actually want in a financial app, and what makes using the app so easy.

Additionally, you must undertake thorough UX research to identify the novel ideas that will astound your app's consumers and provide you a competitive edge.

Additionally, you may do thorough UX research while keeping the market, your target audience, and your UVP (Unique Value Proposition) at the forefront, as well as conducting SWOT and PEST (Political, Economic, Sociological, and Technological) analyses.

You will be closer to finishing the creation of your award-winning fintech app as a result of all this research. 

3. Define scope of the product (SOP)

An SOP document, as its name implies, is a thorough examination of your app development project that defines the boundaries of the product by outlining the product description, objectives, and goals, deliverables, scope boundaries, assumptions, and dependencies, as well as acceptance criteria.

In essence, it says that you should have a clear grasp of your project and the needs for its implementation in order to prevent execution-time misunderstandings that result in project failures. It will undoubtedly involve product thinking, which will help you develop a solution that revolutionizes the market.

In order to effectively scope your project, work with a seasoned financial app development firm like Naxtre that sends specialised project managers and business analysts. 

4. Choose the right technology and app development model 

If you want to follow the trend and design a fintech mobile app, you have two different technological alternatives to consider:

• Native fintech mobile app development: Android and iOS
• Cross-platform fintech mobile app development: either using Flutter or React Native

Flutter or React Native for cross-platform financial mobile app development? Beware of confusion! Do not fret! To help you narrow down your decision criteria, we have given a particular guide on native vs. cross-platform app development. 

5. Choose the right IT team and engagement model

It's time to choose the appropriate IT team engagement model that successfully satisfies your objectives, coupled with budget planning. There are a lot of arguments being made about dedicated recruiting vs fixed cost hiring, so you definitely don't want to have too many options.

Simply put, you can choose fixed-cost staffing when the project scope is defined. However, if you want to explore and your fintech app development project includes a range of requirements, you may choose worry-free hourly hiring.

However, hourly hiring is advantageous in both scenarios. You'll still need to know when and how to hire specialist app developers for your project, as well as the best strategy to do it. 

6. Mind the fintech compliance

As we've already covered, in order to identify and safeguard your users against frauds, you must guarantee compliance with privacy laws like GDPR, PCI-DSS, and many others while putting your fintech app into use. 

The level of legal compliance that your app must meet, however, differs by nation. As a result, you must consider the security and privacy laws in place in your target nation while developing your fintech app. 

7. Create UI/UX design

Even if your idea for a fintech app development is really good, it will still fall short if it doesn't have a user-friendly UI/UX. Therefore, app UI/UX design is crucial for your fintech to guarantee that customers have a simple and enjoyable experience when using your app. It also establishes expectations for your brand's reputation.

To make your financial app seem unique and appealing, which may connect with your app users while facilitating their navigation and enhancing user experience, be sure to avoid typical UI/UX design blunders and adhere to app design trends. 

8. Develop an MVP

Your concept for a fintech app has to be evaluated for usefulness, which is where creating an MVP helps you so much.

You should concentrate on the main app functionality and features rather than the intricate UI/UX design while creating your MVP since you must first advertise your app and determine the interests of your target market.

It essentially saves you a tonne of time, money, and development work. If your fintech MVP is a success, you can start adding functionality to it and turn it into a full-fledged fintech app with an engaging, easy-to-use UI that provides a superior user experience. 

9. Build, test, and use feedback to iterate till you find success

The primary development phase, sometimes referred to as the iterative app development process, is now under progress. The creation of your fintech app does not finish when it is published to the app store.

You must constantly upgrade it to maintain its efficacy, stay abreast of technical developments, satisfy the high expectations of current users, and surpass rivals. 

A/B testing is required in order to determine which version clients prefer. You should be aware of the following KPIs to evaluate the performance of your fintech app:

 

•  Average transaction time
• App install-to-registration ratio
• Daily/monthly active users
• Users’ time spent on your app
• App visit through push notifications
• Times app gestures become unresponsive
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
• Customer retention rate

Top 6 Mistakes to Avoid When Building a Fintech App

Well, learning the proper method for developing your fintech app is a bonus, but in order to prevent frequent pitfalls, you must also be aware of them. They are listed below:

• Unappealing user onboarding
•  Not focusing on UX
• Overlooking app security
• Not up to the mark data cleansing
• Not thoroughly testing the app 

How Much Does It Cost to Develop a Full-fledged Fintech App?

• The price of developing a financial app is not standard. Every company has diverse financial app development experience and distinctive suggestions to present.
• Additional factors that affect the cost of developing fintech apps include:
• Fintech app development type with complexity
• Fintech app design requirements
• App features and functions
• Location of the app development company
• Technology stack
• The expertise of the app developers
• No. of designers and developers you hire
• MVP development
• 3rd Party API integrations
• App testing
• App support and maintenance
• Type of fintech app development engagement model type you select 

How Can Naxtre Help You In Fintech App Development?

We hope that after reading this article, you have a far broader understanding of how to set up the scope of your fintech app than simply the basics of constructing one. Fintech applications help consumers, as well as organizations, handle their finances more conveniently.

Leading financial app development firm Naxtre has a wealth of experience creating different fintech apps. We like innovations and have worked with a large number of customers internationally to create their flagship fintech solutions, which have significantly changed their businesses and given them a competitive advantage.