Financial institutions such as banks and insurance companies reportedly spend $6 billion every year on IT to maintain core systems. Departments in these companies build separate apps for different purposes to meet their customers’ demands, which leads to duplication of efforts and wasted resources.
Financial institutions also face the challenge of integrating their legacy infrastructure with advanced technologies like cloud and mobile. There is a huge demand for modern financial apps that can address customer requirements like faster transactions, enhanced security, better user experience (UX), and ready access from anywhere. This has prompted developers to integrate finance app development services into their repertoire.
Finance app development offers multiple benefits such as increased revenue, quick turnaround time (QAT), reduced cost of (CAC), and competitive advantage.
- Personalized User Experience:
With the user experience mantra ruling application development, a finance app must have improved functionality and look-and-feel to attract users. This requires intensive use of frontend frameworks, development tools, functional components, UI elements, and UX architecture best practices for building a right mix of efficiency and elegance. As both Android and iOS platforms encourage developers to build apps with robust frontend architecture, the trend is likely to continue in 2017.
- Security as a Service:
Top financial institutions prioritize security above all else for their mobile apps. They need additional features such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), seamless OTP integration, one-time password (OTP) generation on devices, and secure cloud connectivity. As a result, developers are building security services as a separate SaaS offering using advanced technologies such as biometrics, multi-key encryption, and device fingerprinting.
- Embedded Banking Services:
Finance apps can significantly reduce operational costs for financial institutions by enabling customers to perform transactions from within the app instead of going to bank branches or ATM kiosks. Banks have started embedding banking services in payroll, payment gateways, tax calculators, direct deposit utilities, expense managers, etc., into their apps that also include real-time balance updates and transaction history. They provide remote support through live chat and email facilities for immediate troubleshooting.
- Social Collaboration:
Social media platforms have become a primary source of information for financial decisions. To meet customers’ demands, companies need to include social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and LinkedIn into their apps to gather insights from customer reviews on industries, products, services, and individual firms. A finance app with this capability can offer more personalized solutions while providing immediate assistance to dissatisfied customers.
- Unified Client Experience:
A unified UX strategy across multiple channels provides a seamless experience to the user by allowing him/her to perform transactions from a desktop or mobile device, while also allowing bank employees full visibility of all client interactions through one system. This helps organizations save costs on infrastructure and maintenance while cutting down the time required for client support. New-age finance apps use progressive web apps (PWA) and service workers to offer a rich client experience.
- Big Data Analytics:
Finance organizations gain an edge over their competitors by harnessing the enormous potential of Big Data for finance app development. They can develop advanced analytics features such as sentiment analysis, financial risk assessment, predictive reporting, real-time customer profiling & segmentation, social network mining, etc., that enhance business intelligence and knowledge management capabilities. A wealth of information from the Internet of Things (Iota) also adds to the value of Big Data in finance app development.
- Cloud Integration:
The cloud has emerged as an effective solution for faster deployment and improved scalability and flexibility. It also helps companies reduce infrastructure management costs and lower entry barriers for new services. Finance apps leverage the cloud to store data, run web servers, implement security protocols, develop APIs, etc., to drive greater mobility across devices at any time or place.
- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP):
Finance organizations can use AMPs to make their finance apps load faster on mobile devices. AMPs are secure pages that follow a set of pre-defined guidelines to present content that loads almost immediately on any device with internet connection. These pages are optimized for search engines so that users can locate them easily through search queries using keywords related to finance apps.
- Block chain Technology:
This is one of the most promising technologies in finance app development that enables cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ripple, etc., and offers a transparent and secure alternative to traditional banking transactions. The technology is being used by banks, finch startups, and even governments to develop innovative payment processing apps.
- Digital Assistants:
The digital assistant market was valued at USD 4.43 Billion in 2015 and is expected to reach USD 8.95 Billion by 2022. These cloud-based platforms are modeled on natural language processing capabilities of human beings and can be implemented on various devices including smart phones, tablets, laptops, watches , speakers, cars , TVs , appliances , Drones , etc., for advanced voice recognition features . They can perform multiple tasks such as online search results based on queries from users, booking tickets/ making reservations, playing music, etc., and reduce dependency on finance apps by providing personalized solutions.
This concludes our list of the top 10 trends in finance app development. If you’ve enjoyed this article or found it useful, please show us some love by liking & sharing it.
