Fintech or financial services offered through state of the art technologies and digital platforms have already become key ingredients of modern financial companies and their offerings. Whether it is insurance, home loans, savings and term deposit products or business loans, every financial product today depends on Fintech. Fintech also gave rise to hi-tech, financial products entirely based on technologies and thus we have got digital currencies like Bitcoin. As Fintech can only grow thanks to smarter innovations that keep pouring, for startups, it offers a never-before opportunity.
How to build an innovative and business-driven fintech mobile app to propel growth for your startup? What are the key considerations when developing a new fintech app? Let’s explain a few of them here.
Start With Your Target Audience
The first thing that any fintech startup should focus upon is the user persona that grossly represents most of the subtle and prominent aspects of your target audience. You need to focus upon the basic and elementary aspects of this user persona first. To narrow down your options to the ideal one select the age, marital status, income status, device preferences and lifestyle habits that coherently can be seen in most of your target audience.
For example, the upmarket young employees working in corporates are more geared to make good investment decisions or opt for financial planning. Typically, they belong to 25 to 35 age bracket, live alone, earns a six-figure salary, ambitious and energetic to work extra hard to move ahead and liberal in social habits. This ideal profile can have deviations, but most of your target investors share a lot of aspects with this. So, by orienting your fintech app with this user persona, you are just on track to address your audience with the right solutions.
Know What Your Target Audience Needs Most Market Analysis
When you have hit a gross or near-perfect user persona that bears the characteristics of your audience, the next step is to focus on all the aspirations and wants of this audience. What are their key financial concerns and how they vary in different situations and contexts? How they approach fintech apps to find solutions? What are the common triggers for using fintech apps and what are the pain points and turn-offs? What makes people desert fintech apps after initial days of use? These are the questions you need to ask.
The best way to get answers to these questions is to get help from expert market research and drawing your answers through data analytics. Learning from other competitor fintech apps is also an excellent way to avoid mistakes. If the majority of your audience is never reluctant to embrace smart investment for growth, your fintech app should reflect this. Similarly, if your audience happens to be less-interested in hi-tech means, your app should focus on easy onboarding and educating users about the uses and benefits.
Address the User Context
Last but not least of all considerations will be addressing different user contexts. For the app developers, user context corresponds to the time, place and situation of using an app. For one user persona, there can be several different user contexts and corresponding needs for using the fintech app.
For example, your fintech app allowing users to make an investment using mobile platforms can help the investor to browse appropriate stock rates on the go and make quick decisions. In a different time and place, the same investor can be prescribed a different mix of stable investment options. Knowing different user contexts and catering to these user contexts through the same app, is key to success for a fintech app.
Build Fintech MVP
MVP or Minimum Viable Product approach works best for fintech startups as you can just begin with the elementary or basic features that define your app and can improve the user experience over time as you keep getting feedbacks. As an MVP it should deliver all that your target users primarily expect from the app.
On the other hand, MVP allows you to build the app faster and at a lower budget than a fully-fledged one. For any startup, this comes as a big respite. Your fintech startup can just take off quickly because of the MVP approach.
Budget
After all, you are a startup, and you are going to collide head-on with a very matured industry thriving with big and established names as your competitors. Like every startup, you are likely to have humble resources, and so, the budget should be a key consideration right from the start. As the journey of most successful fintech startups show, the budget needs to have clear planning with real understanding.
MVP approach will help you cut on budget with minimum viable features for launching the basic app. But then, budget consideration should not command your choice of features. The elementary app features cannot be sacrificed due to an unexpected hole in the budget. You can only reduce cost by striking out additional features and all those “extras” (not irrelevant, exactly) without which your app stays just true to its goal.
Build a Prototype
For your fintech app to be successful and rocking, ensure it gets enough iteration and inputs from your audience. Start by building a prototype and approach a target audience group to get feedback and all sorts of constructive ideas. The prototype just built without much sophistication can help you get a lot of valuable and actionable insights to build the app better.
Conclusion
While fintech startups will continue to come with new and smarter solutions and make the market more competitive, the growth potential will never cringe thanks to an innovative and more intelligent use of technologies in shaping financial decisions of the people.
