The way customers were accessing or overseeing financial information is now completely revolutionized by fintech applications. Although companies offer customized financial software development services for a wide range of financial solutions like stock portfolio consolidation, retirement saving guides, money management tools, and budget planning resources, they create each fintech app to fulfill a purpose or meet specific requirements.
Though fintech applications may have targeted such different customer bases and their requirements, the large array of applications that are released across the last few years shares a common goal that is enhancing the financial management services experience of the user.
If you are creating any kind of fintech app for the first time and are a non-tech person then I highly recommend you outsource your project to experts or leading fintech development companies. They will guide you through the entire development process and will also save you from possible setbacks and pitfalls. But if you want to actively pursue coding as your career then I must warn you that you must remember that you have some expectations and need of a targeted audience to meet. And most importantly, in doing so, your app might have to collect sensitive data that can be vulnerable to potential cyber-attacks.
Some of the first-time developers tend to get carried away with the excitement to build a perfect application for their audience that they overlook the accessibility and the key security features of the app during the development process. Therefore, to make sure that you don’t make this or any similar mistakes, we will discuss some of the common mistakes that a new fintech app designer tends to make and how you could prevent that from happening.
Top 10 mistakes that a developer must avoid
Insufficient Testing
You must test your products thoroughly and it applies to all kinds of software projects. Also, testing your apps manually won’t be enough, you can’t just spot-check the results and launch your product off to users. You must use automated testing that includes failure cases, success cases, and more. Although this rule applies to every software development process in general, it is important to reiterate the point in the context of fintech development. If any bug exists in your app because of your insufficient testing then your mistake can cost your user a bad financial transaction which would result in a massive financial loss. So it becomes vital for you to ensure that not a single bug slips through the testing process of the code and the application.Data Filtration is Not Practiced
Fintech is an integral part of the finance industry which exposes it to all types of unsanitized data. Fintech applications gather data from various sources in different kinds of formats as well as undefined quantity and quality. Apart from that, the finance sector is very intertwined with other markets so the risks of having an encounter with a lot of undefined and unidentified bugs are very high for the developers of fintech applications. You might be looking at them in data that you pulled off from some database, the legacy files that you extracted from the mainframe, the Twitter firehose, or maybe the stock exchange. And this data is always extensively networked with each other. So it is highly recommended that a developer should always filter the data, clean it and then and only then pull it for use in the app for the users. If you implement data filtration practices into your development process, there are high chances that you will be eliminating the bugs from a lot of places. You can use the default values to change the unfiltered data.Not Following Security Approaches
The developers must imply and follow some strict security protocols for the sake of the app and its potential users. The sensitive user information that your app might store must be protected with a highly-encrypted code. You can use the latest security features like facial recognition or any other biometric identification method to make sure that access to the fintech software is granted to the authorized person only. To achieve this successfully, you must plan to the end and plan it very carefully too.Accessibility
While building an application, some people tend to forget to keep their audience or targeted users in mind let alone consider the base of users with disabilities. Making your app easily accessible for everyone by adding the assisting technologies in it is one of the good qualities of a developer. The user experience is directly affected by accessibility. After all, it is all about how easy or hard they find your app to use. So next time you are creating a fintech app, you must accommodate it according to the requirements of your potential users irrespective of their situational barriers or disabilities. You must consider the concept of universal design for fintech apps which allows you to cover all types of users in terms of accessibility. It also includes optimizable, flexibility, simplicity, fewer repeated actions, intuitiveness, size and shapes for use and approach, and more.Failing to Take Your Target Audience Into Account
When you are new to product development, you might get tempted to include all kinds of features and facilities to make the best product in the market.it is quite understandable that you wish to deliver what’s best for the users along with a desire to stand out from the crowd. But you can’t possibly give a better user experience to the customers by including all kinds of money management solutions in your app, you can deliver it by including the ones that your targeted audience needs. So before you start coding, you must know who your targeted audience is. For instance, you create an app that will guide the users to plan their budget, then to whom would you aim to sell this product? Who do you think will need the guidance? The ones that are in debt or have exclusive spending habits. A businessman with a rich investment portfolio won’t need your app to create a budget. You must also need to consider your potential clients like your user base will be the people who want to organize their finances or current financial situation. Apart from that, the people who want to increase their buying potential can also be included as your target audience. You have to take all the factors into account while you set the goal of your application and determine the target audience for it. The customers won’t spend any money on a product with features that they thought they might use someday. They would only buy the product that will satisfy their current needs. And not all users need help with all the aspects of finances. So if you go beyond the requirements of your targeted marketplace by creating an app with features that your customers couldn’t relate to then chances are that they wouldn’t even buy your fintech applications for the features they could relate to. The unnecessary features might; together discourage them from downloading your app in the first place. Your target audience is the key. So make sure you have a clear understanding of their needs as well as challenges and your ideas about overcoming them.UX Errors
There are many finance environments such as internal banking that need a better UX for the customers and internal users. So it is better to employ expert UX designers to add the features into the app instead of doing it all by yourself to optimize it for all the platforms on which it would be used by your targeted audience. Every financial ecosystem deals with finance-related data and money, so your fintech app should be well organized, reliable, and easy to use.Wrong Performance Goals
Let us assume that you are building a real-time trading engine. What goals would you set for it? How many terabytes of data are processed every minute or how many kilobytes of data in an hour? How about a monthly processing batch? Software engineers tend to optimize their code scripts at the cost of maintainability and readability whereas others do the exact opposite thing. None of which is good. So what you need to do if you want to set the parameters that define the success of your app is first to understand what your software requires? Never get into the trap of software with slow architecture or premature code optimization. There are two more mistakes related to this that developers tend to make which we will see further below.Failing to Maintain Consistency
Your app speaks for your brand to the users. So you need to keep everything in the right proportion when you are developing the fintech app for your customers. If you fail to maintain consistency, then you would be screwing it all up. And this mistake has already caused nightmares to many developers out there. You should always keep a fixed color scheme, typography, graphics, and more. If you miss this and your app looks like a cocktail of lucrative things then you would fail to deliver the message of your brand instead it will imply to them that your app and services are inconsistent as well as incompetent. So, whatever font, scheme, or color you chose for your product, it all depends on you and your brand image. But make sure that you have followed it consistently throughout your application without any mistakes.Incompatible Development and Deployment
While creating a product for platforms like Windows and Linux, the fintech developers must always use a cautious approach. Let us assume that a fintech software company has figured out a successful model to work with a Windows 32 bit compiler. But if the company moves to directly deploy the software application without even considering other platforms, then that fintech app is bound to crash. So the fintech developers need to find the incompatible development and deployment issues as soon as possible.Gold Standard Results
If you are working on any data analysis project then you would know that for a given set of inputs, you can identify certain sts of right results for it. That is why we recommend you write a set of “gold standards” which will regularly test your software output for the given set of input. You might get two types of results which are as mentioned below:- Your algorithm is improved and shows promising results. So all you have to do is to verify the results manually and then update your gold standard results.
- The results have deteriorated. Probably because you might have made a mistake so you need to fix the issues over here.
