SCAM WARNING Learn more ⚠️
Financial apps are incredibly popular because people love to be able to check on their finances at the spur of the moment. They want to be able to verify a balance, transfer funds, update information, or a host of other financial aspects right from their phone. However, this convenience comes at a high price to the people who develop financial apps. From security and identity theft to displays and financial data, there is a lot to consider when developing a financial app.
Financial apps are incredibly popular because people love to be able to check on their finances at the spur of the moment. They want to be able to verify a balance, transfer funds, update information, or a host of other financial aspects right from their phone. However, this convenience comes at a high price to the people who develop financial apps. From security and identity theft to displays and financial data, there is a lot to consider when developing a financial app.
To help you plan the development of your financial app, here are some of the things you need to contemplate before you get started.
The term financial app covers a wide range of different types of financial apps:
That isn’t even a complete list, but it does cover the bulk of apps that people use. While PayPal and Venmo are similar, they provide several distinctly different services. Budgeting apps may access banking apps, and investment apps may focus on a particular type of investment (Bitcoin has its own app, which is different from managing stock investments).
Before you start, you need to know what kind of financial services you want to offer.
If you have a financial institution, this question is fairly easy and you can check out similar apps to get an idea of the kinds of services you need at a minimum. For most other people developing financial apps, it is far less clear what should be included. Knowing your target audience will help you decide what is right to include in your app, but there are so many financial niches you need to take the time to figure out what will make the most sense for your customers.
If you want to create a simple financial app that uses manual entry, you run the risk of people being less likely to use it because people will quickly grow tired of having to make those entries. However, it is also a lot more secure and requires less security since you don’t need any account information to their financial institutions or other apps. It also takes less time to create.
You can also make a more complex service which provides automation with their financial institutions available. These apps are not only more time consuming to make, they require a lot more security measures to be applied so that you aren’t creating an easy way for malicious hackers to access your customers' financial institutions.
There are apps that require very simple security measures because they are not connected with any real financial information. Hackers can’t steal passwords or information to their actual financial accounts since you haven’t connected them. In this case, you need simple security, including a user name, password, and password recovery. You will want to emphasize in the access that app users should have a unique password that is not used for their financial apps. Also, highlight the fact that they should never enter account numbers to their financial institutions or data that could be used to access those accounts.
Most financial apps (really apps in general since many allow for people to make in app purchases) connect to financial institutions. If your app updates based on information from a person’s financial institutions, you need to make sure that your security is incredibly robust. If your app gets hacked, it could compromise the financial information for all of your users. You will need to budget a lot more to securing accounts and regular maintenance to keep security current.
Financial apps have a lot more room in terms of how you can present the data people are checking. Charts, graphs, and other visual displays can be made available so that people can customize their view. Researching similar apps will give you an idea of the vast array of ways of displaying data that is easy to quickly consume to help customers make a determination.
You want to provide a range of displays with different filters so that people can quickly focus on whatever they want to view. Remember that people tend to use these apps to make snap decisions. You need to tailor the app to make it easy to review a lot of data quickly.
There are a lot of people who tend to take a laissez faire approach to managing their money, but just as many like to get a good understanding of how they are spending their money. If you have a financial app, you need to focus on those people who will be interested in analyzing their spending, savings, budget, or other financial information.
Along with security, this is probably the functionality that will have the greatest change over time. You will make updates based on feedback and reviews.
This blog just covers the basics. When building a financial app, research is what really helps you understand not only what the competition is offering, but what does and doesn’t work. You can build your ideas based on what you do and don’t like about the current apps available. Sometimes taking a new approach can create a greater interest, particularly in an industry that is already nearly saturated with options. Bringing something new to the table will increase the odds of your app's success.