Challenges Faced by Developers While Developing Fintech Applications

“Robust backend, intuitive frontend, and efficient tech stacks, FinTech app development touches on all these factors. But FinTech application developers still face challenges that genuinely persist and are worth mulling over.”

Business application development for financial services providers has come a long way. It has transcended the traditional boundaries to ensure data optimization, security, compliance, scalability, agility, and innovation, which are the need of the hour. On the other hand, banking, insurance, and other financial institutions want to deploy FinTech (Financial Technologies) such as cloud, IoT (Internet of Things), intelligent automation, AI (Artificial Intelligence), big data, analytics, and more to practice continuous facelift and safeguard their relevance. Amidst these need and want, challenges mounts for FinTech application developers, who are forced to beat the bush out of their mind.

7 FinTech App Development Challenges Developers Must Keep in Mind

Because they tend to reoccur with the changing business demand and customers’ behavior, challenges — concerning FinTech app development — are never-ending. However, irrespective of the difference in business logic, goals, target audience, products, and services segment, and so on, the success of FinTech applications depends on their ability to allow innovation and deliver seamless user experiences.

But to match these success parameters, developers must be well aware of the common challenges that can create bottlenecks and mar the performance of FinTech applications designed and developed by them. The following are the seven topmost FinTech app development challenges that developers must be aware of while building modern, scalable, and agile FinTech applications.

• Collating the Right FinTech Stack

Choosing the right FinTech stack, i.e., servers, tools, programming languages, technologies, frameworks, databases, and more, is paramount to pursue custom FinTech software development. Developers must consider the clients’ business goals and analyze their organizations’ maturity levels before selecting the FinTech stacks to build bespoke FinTech software solutions that can help deal with specific challenges. Whether they choose Ruby or Java or Python or C++, for that matter, as their programming language, it all depends upon what best suits per business requirements. Selecting the proper FinTech stack parameters can also depend on clients’ operating systems, computation categorization, type of applications required, backends, and more.

• Ensuring Data Security and Compliance

Customer trust is vital for financial services providers while delivering products and services across segments. The COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly surged the demand for digital banking and platforms such as self-service portals. At the same time, the need for FinTech apps has grown manifold, and so does the need to protect customer data and ensure complete compliance with the regulatory standards.

According to an article in Forbes, 30% of customers still believe in traditional banks, not in FinTech companies, due to trust issues. Only 27% of customers believe in FinTech companies. Developers must ensure that FinTech applications copy with GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) guidelines, for instance, and provide customer’s data security at all costs, irrespective of the fact that the apps deliver hyper-personalized experiences and add to banking convenience.

• Enabling Cross-Platform Support and Functionality

Markets are filled with intelligent devices that run on disparate operating systems (OS) and platforms, including macOS, Android, iOS, Linux, Microsoft Windows. Therefore, FinTech software developers should keep in mind another critical factor: to build cross-platform FinTech apps that leverage the native capabilities of the different smart devices to deliver seamless user experiences. Developers can choose application development frameworks such as React Native and Flutter to build highly secure, fast, and responsive FinTech applications that run on different OS and in a different environment, using a single codebase. Cross-platform FinTech apps can help clients reduce costs, increase customer outreach, shorten the time-to-market, and deliver rich user experiences.

• Creating Hybrid Integration-Ready Applications

Innovation is the key to business success in the modern age, and hybrid integration capabilities help you follow a direct and convenient route to practicing continuous innovation. Thus, developers must pursue FinTech app development, where there is enough room to fit in hybrid integration strategies. They should make API (Application Programming Interfaces) the standard language to enable free-flow communication and interaction between internal and external — i.e., third-parties — systems, applications, and other business platforms. With hybrid integration-ready FinTech applications, FinTech developers can enable businesses to build a connected ecosystem and reap the benefits of innovative business models such as bancassurance and open banking.

• Building Hybrid Cloud Architecture

FinTech software solutions underpinned with hybrid cloud architecture are critical to building an optimistic future of worldwide financial services providers. Developers must ensure that the FinTech applications they are building supports multi-cloud platforms. With this, they would help businesses reinvent the IT landscape and reduce the complexities concerning business infrastructure. Cloud-ready FinTech applications help financial services providers subscribe to SaaS (Software-as-a-Service)-based models or leverage public and private cloud platforms for the efficient functioning of their businesses. When consumers’ behavior tends to change at an unprecedented speed, cloud-ready FinTech applications ensure scalability and agility and helps financial companies stay ahead of the competition curve.

• Implementing Enterprise Mobility

Business applications are the linchpin between customers and businesses. The demand for remote working and the need to make financial products and services available and accessible 24*7, anytime, and across the devices highlights the need to attain enterprise mobility. And meeting the demands of enterprise mobility and building FinTech apps to support it is crucial in the current market condition. It allows employees to perform different business tasks and functions from remote locations and right through one single application. On the other hand, FinTech applications supporting enterprise mobility enable customers to use their smart devices to explore products and services at their convenience.

• Practicing Technology Integration

FinTech applications are significantly helping financial services providers break the traditional boundaries and innovate at scale. Technology integration can help developers explore boundless possibilities. They can implement intelligent automation to help businesses attain end-to-end enterprise automation and lean on technologies such as conversational AI to deliver human-like experiences to customers while interacting with chatbots. A FinTech application that supports continuous technology integration helps financial businesses shape the future of work. Be it deploying disruptive InsurTech or RegTech models, creating solutions such as peer-to-peer lending, wealth management, crowdfunding, or exploring distributed ledger technology, i.e., blockchain to create smart contracts and NFT marketplaces, for instance.

Robust FinTech Applications Helps Financial Businesses Drive Experiences Across Endpoints

Markets in the digital age are mobile-heavy, and business applications are considered the best way to increase customer outreach. An efficient application essentially helps in attracting and retaining customers in the digital age. And FinTech applications significantly revolutionize the way customers engage, interact, and transact with financial services providers, including banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions.

In the current finance market, FinTech applications mean convenience and impeccable experiences for customers. But that is not all. FinTech applications are about drilling down data to learn about the latest trends and customers behavior. Therefore, understanding the challenges while practicing FinTech app development can help developers enable clients and businesses to have a long-term relationship with their customers and gain competitive advantages.

Originally Published On: https://www.batimes.com/articles/the-topmost-challenges-faced-by-developers-while-developing-fintech-applications/