FinTech app development saw a major uptick in 2021 following a post-Covid surge in funding. From neobanking, trading, wealth management and insurance, to PayTech and eCommerce, businesses rushed to cater to the growing smartphone adoption world over. 

  • Even though FinTech funding for H1 ‘22 was 24% down from the same period last year, the figure came in at a solid $52.9 billion, according to Deloitte.
  • Every major segment took a hit in H1 ‘22 compared to H1 ‘21:
    • BankTech [-14%]
    • InsurTech [-48%]
    • InvestTech [-34%]
    • PropTech [-34%]
  • On the positive side, the value of the M&A deals increased by over 50%, reaching $46.4 billion.
  • When it comes to financial inclusion in banking markets as mature as the US, 71% of bank customers use online banking and 43% use mobile banking regularly. A US consumer will use a debit card an average of 22.8 times a month.

In this piece we unveil how to develop a FinTech app through the prism of both established and up-to-the-minute mobile banking trends.

What Is A Mobile Fintech App?

FinTech is rather a broad term, with payments embedded at its core. In its broadest meaning, any eCommerce mobile application with a payment gateway can be viewed as falling under the banner of  FinTech. In its more focused definition, FinTech is associated with all technological solutions that facilitate the work of financial establishments and institutions, like banks, traders, insurers, and investors.

Mobile fintech apps are mobile applications for the banking, investment, wealth management, payment and insurance industries, which digitize customer-facing or internal procedures through a mobile software solution with secure access levels and identity management. Cross-border payment apps, neobank apps, and mobile insurance marketplaces are examples of a fintech app.

It is not unusual for the mobile and desktop version of a financial app to have different functionality. The trend toward mobile-first UX/UI app design has evolved into mobile-only design, where desktop is omitted altogether. These apps are made for on-the-go consumption and must be trimmed of clutter.

How to Build a FinTech App in 2022: 10 Mobile Banking Trends That Define Leaderboard

1. Lower Transaction Fees: Default Setting, Not a USP Any More

Paying $50 to transfer $50 across the border was not a distant reality in many developing countries. PayPal, Stripe, Wise, as well as traditional banking institutions are now fighting for the cross-border payment market with hefty investments.

Technologies like blockchain, cryptocurrencies, AI, cloud computing, IoT, all help reduce transaction fees for the end user.

The global cross-border payments market is set to reach $156 trillion in 2022 according to Ernst & Young, with B2B transactions responsible for 96% of the volume. Emerging markets are the most fertile soil for disruptors, driven by a change in customers’ mindsets, growing smartphone adoption, as well as a shift in the supply/demand curve.

High-value B2B transactions are still mostly carried out via traditional CBN due to lack of optimization opportunities. However, the fragmented low-check B2C and C2C segments offer a lot of opportunities for aggregators, backend networks and digitally-enabled transfer operators to disrupt the conventional banking methods.

Kuda, OPay, VBank, Stone, Chipper Cash, Nubank, Finclusion are examples of successful FinTech solutions disrupting these emerging markets.

2. Faster Transactions: Real-Time Fast

Many of the savvy customers of financial services have experienced the speed and ease of using crypto wallets for money transfers, where it takes minutes for money to travel hundreds of miles.

Real time transactions, too, have set the consumer expectations high in terms of how fast they want to be able to pay a business partner or send money to their friends.

According to PYMNTS’ research, real-time disbursements grew by 5.7% in 2021, making it responsible for 17% of all disbursements.

Elena Whisler, Senior VP at The Clearing House (TCH) , cites the growth in electronic payment methods as one of the reasons. She adds:

“…Growth is coming from the availability of more real-time methods for businesses. More financial institutions are enabling the offerings as well.”

The real-time payments market is set to reach $16 billion in 2022 and grow at a CAGR of 33% in the following decade, according to Factmr. 

The government-backed adoption of 5G precipitates the process across the globe. Country-wide and pan-European governmental initiatives also help the exponential growth of these financial services. Examples include:

  • European TARGET Instant Payment Settlement (TIPS)
  • UK’s faster payments
  • US’s FedNowSM Service

It won’t be  a surprise if transaction speed ends up being more valuable than lower fees in a few years.

3. Apple Pay & Google Pay: Mobile Payments Are Quickly Expanding Their Influence

Two behemoth Big Tech players, Apple and Google, turned their smartphone devices into a payment method that’s always there. People may leave a wallet behind, but they check their smartphone a few times per hour.

According to Business of Apps, Apple Pay reached 507 million users while Google Pay hit 421 million, Chinese AliPay and WeChat lead the global Mobile Payments app users ranking.

In fact, Apple’s “Service” revenue [which includes Apple Pay] accounts for 20.4% of the company’s revenue. Talk about FinTech & PayTech disruption potential for Big Tech.

“As previously announced, XTM has been working diligently rolling out more than 100K mobile wallets and by adding Apple Pay and Google pay to the Today program it will not only enhance the offering with convenience, but it will promote POS spend and in turn enable XTM to increase its interchange revenue percentage when calculating as a percentage of gross dollar value loads (GDV).”

4. Tap to Pay on iPhone: Your Smartphone is Your POS

Apple announced the release of a new feature that will allow businesses to accept payments from a customer’s iPhone to their iPhone with a tap on an iOS-enabled partner app: Tap to Pay. Essentially, this could chip away at the POS market for small businesses in the long term. Stripe is expected to be the first partner and beneficiary of this new feature designed with the help of NFC technology, which will enable contactless payments.

“As more and more consumers are tapping to pay with digital wallets and credit cards, Tap to Pay on iPhone will provide businesses with a secure, private, and easy way to accept contactless payments and unlock new checkout experiences using the power, security, and convenience of iPhone. In collaboration with payment platforms, app developers, and payment networks, we’re making it easier than ever for businesses of all sizes — from solopreneurs to large retailers — to seamlessly accept contactless payments and continue to grow their business.”

Jennifer Bailey, Apple’s vice president of Apple Pay and Apple Wallet. 

It’s a potential game-changer for small businesses, but we’ll need to keep an eye on this exciting innovation in FinTech and PayTech.

5. Blockchain Adoption: “Fast & Cheap” is Now On the Menu

When you think about how to make a FinTech app, you think of outsmarting your competition in transaction cost and transaction speed in the first place.

The major uses of Blockchain in FinTech are designed to promote these once-unrealistic objectives. You can send money quicker and faster with blockchain technology — in a manner that’s immutable, auditable, and relatively safe. 

P2P transaction with no intermediaries and respective transaction fees? Sure. 

Automatic insurance payouts based on smart contracts? You got it.

6. Gamification: Responsible Positive Reinforcement in Financial Apps

Gamification sounds like a very un-financial feature, but it’s widely used in fintech app development.

The fintech UX designers at Dev.Pro trust that banking, savings, and investment applications may benefit from some gamified components, but functionality should still play the first priority. When developing a neobank from scratch, you should create a perfectly functional feature first before considering how to gamify it.

Companies like Moroku have elaborated a gamification-as-a-service offering for FinTech, helping them drive user engagement and loyalty by using leaderboards, investment streak milestone roadmaps, quizzes, and even simple colorful micro animations.

Do you know how you reach a certain milestone on your savings app and a digital confetti on the screen makes you feel good? This is behavioral finance married to gamification in action.

7. Cashback: Competing for Thinner Margins On a Larger Client Base

A cashback feature is the new norm for any fintech product, as digital wallets, PayTech companies, and neobanks compete to offer the best terms to their clients. The logic here is to have slightly smaller margins on a significantly bigger client base.

Banks offer cash back of up to 6% on certain purchases online or offline, trying to compete for client loyalty among high spenders.

Credit card cash back rate for AmEx Blue Cash Preferred card

Needless to note, cash back costs banking institutions, so this feature can also be combined in a statistics and reporting page, or a separate savings tracker, highlighting how much cashback a client has accumulated in a specific period.

Gamifying this perk is also a great idea, because a congratulatory motion design element and/or sound may trigger a positive reaction in a customer’s mind.

8. Visualization and Reporting: Alert, Educate, Explain

When you want to know how to build a FinTech app, you simply cannot do without visualization. It helps educate your clients financially, alert them of looming financial trouble, and set visual patterns for monthly spending to train financial responsibility.

One of the main screens in FinTech app design for visualization is the Stats & Reporting dashboard, but mini graphs and visual elements can appear on any screen. Here’s how a Polish PKO bank app uses a tiny visualization of the up-to-the-minute currency exchange rate for those looking to save on a better rate.

9. Voice Recognition and Hands-Free: MCommerce Growing Trends

Voice recognition is no stranger in FinTech, as many customer service, financial education, and advisory businesses use voice recognition technology combined with AI to automate the process.

Finley AI, for example, uses voice recognition and artificial intelligence technologies to educate their customers about finances in general and pension planning in particular.

10. BNPL: Buy Now Pay Later Generation

BNPL exists as a separate financial service, where fintech applications like Klarna allow users to split a payment into parts and pay it later in a month’s time with no interest.

Apple Pay Later is the Big Tech response to these individual services. Its terms are even better: you get to pay the full amount in four parts with 0% interest of fees over six weeks. If you are looking to compile a list of top FinTech app features for your new upcoming fintech software project, you can safely jot this one down. Figures confirm the feature’s growing popularity, as at least 6% of US customers confirmed using a BNPL vendor in the US in 2020.

Innovations in Mobile Banking App

Even as blockchain technology, IoT, mcommerce, robo advisors, and P2P lending have become a staple technologies in FinTech, there is still lots of space for innovation.

Not only do things quickly move forward when new tech appears — as it happened with the cloud revolution, but new startups also emerge from the synergies of a few technologies.

Trends in mobile banking combine the most unusual technologies. A Latvian FinTech startup called Zelf  combined voice recognition with messengers and AI to facilitate quick payments — performed by voice in the comfort of your favorite messaging app: Messenger, WhatsApp or Viber.

5 Tips For Designing a FinTech Mobile App

In order to create a design for a Fintech App, you need a team that is savvy in legal, finance, psychology, economics, and design. After that you need to select a tech stack, design architecture, and develop, deploy, and test a financial mobile application. All of these stages are full of nuance and potential technical hiccups, so a fully-fledged manual on the topic would be a TLDR. 

Here are some of the major tips from a software development partner with 9 existing fintech projects.

Mind Security: DevSecOps as the Right Way to Develop a FinTech App

DevSecOps is the mindset we have implemented in our application development SDLC. We will think about security as early as the stage of vendor selection, cloud service supplier tender and architecture design.

In the area abundant with regulations in KYC, AML, card compliance, GDPR, PSD2, eIDAS, DeFi restrictions, you need to embed security early in the development cycle and keep it tested throughout.

Start Small But be Ready to Scale Fast

All startup founders think of conquering the world, but 90% of them fail in the first year. In decades of working on software development, we learned to focus on small steps alongside the helicopter view plan.

Being cautious on your resources and burn rate is a good tactic for any startup to survive the Death Valley. Build just the product to get you through the next stage. If you need an MVP for investors,  focus on it. If you need to develop a unique feature to set your product aside from competition,  pull your resources from there.

With step-by-step strategy in mind, you need to be able to scale your mobile application fast in case your idea finds support among users. Tech stack, CSP choice, and architecture design are critical in this mission.

Research Startup Realm

Project discovery done right is one of the highest ROI actions in the entire SDLC. Research your segment, its leaders, addressable market, latest trends in acquisition, biggest mega rounds, vivisect pitch decks of the soonicorns, and do a side-by-side comparison of the top fintech mobile apps in your chosen niche.

Don’t let your genius idea get you into the fallacy of reinventing the wheel. Learn from other smart people to outsmart them.

Research Startup Cemetery

This is rather self explanatory advice that echoes the “fail fast and fail often” mantra. This time, you will learn the mistakes of those who failed for you, making them pick up the check, but using the lessons learned along the way.

Get a Great Software Development Vendor Onboard

Only hire a vendor that is capable of bringing a synergistic effect to the table. Ensure they have a heavy fintech portfolio before considering having their team advise you and develop your mobile application.

1+1 is not enough for surviving in this highly competitive realm. You need your partnership to bring the 1+1=3 results. Consider these software development partner criteria.

Creating a FinTech Application: Mission Possible

FinTech is one of those industries where M&A and exits are a reality for the right product at the right time. It takes a great idea with a good market fit, a stellar team or a great tech extension team, lots of coffee, brain, and willpower.

Whatever stage of ripeness your project is at, consider talking to our tech-savvy team and see if we can be your pillar of support and expertise in this fast-changing environment.

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