Top 5 Questions on Launching a Mobile Bank

Answering frequently asked questions about mobile banking development: must-have features, banking technology, security best practices, and more.

16:20 27 April 2021

During 11 years in technology development and 4 years of complete focus on the Fintech and banking industry Velmie identified several questions that were regularly asked by most of their clients during the product development. Today, we decided to share the answers on the most frequent questions about mobile banking, provided by Velmie.

 

What are the must-have features of a banking app?

 

The best practice of defining the features of a digital banking product is to handle market and competitors research and align it with the positioning. It gives a broad perspective on what is the commonly used functionality and how the processes work.

 

However, there is a standard go-to-market set of tools that are highly required by most of our clients and are widely implemented by Fintech players these days. These are as follows:

 

• Instant self-onboarding and digital account opening;
  
  
• Insightful dashboard, account statements;
  
  
• Seamless P2P payments and money transfers;
  
  
• Bills and merchant payments;
  
  
• NFC, QR payments;
  
  
• Operations security powered by biometrics;
  
  
• Customer support (live chat, self-support and other means).
  
  

What are the main criteria to choose banking technology?

 

As it is seen in the industry, the financial services are experiencing massive challenges due to the innovative ideas and the ways modern customers interact with banks, financial institutions and merchants. When choosing technologies or a banking platform solution to build a Fintech product you should keep in mind the customer-first approach. It means to rely on those technologies that will be capable of handling the threats imposed by today's society and its expectations.

 

Fintech players and modern banks shall comply with an increasing number of regulations and standards, stay ahead of the competition by constantly implementing new tools and improving customer experience, leverage new channels, products - all these require migration from archaic legacy systems to more agile architectures. A great example here is the microservices approach which makes the ongoing maintenance and development of additional parts of the system seamless, fast and removes the need of rebuilding the whole system.

 

Furthermore, today's banking solutions are hardly imaginable without APIs. It is all about speed, agility, and personalization. By enabling open API, it’s possible to create a “banking stack” which is easily integrated into customers and third-party service providers systems to deliver a flexible and tailored experience to the end-user.

 

Another major trend in digital banking that we strongly support is the shift to cloud architecture like the AWS platform. Since it gives the possibility to leverage the power of quality data, you can benefit from improved insights about customer behavior and preferences, and thus, provide extremely personalized services and offers.

 

Last, but not least, if you are looking to partner with a technology provider that delivers a white-label platform, then customization opportunities are vital criteria. Whether it is a modular nature of the product or custom services, more often than not it will mean that you won’t pay for the services you don’t need. Likewise, you are able to request tailored tools and functionality that goes beyond the basic feature set.

 

How to ensure the high-level security of a banking solution?

 

Security is one of the key issues in the Fintech industry while customers provide highly vulnerable data like access to banking accounts and payment cards, IDs, etc. Moreover, customers are more aware of data value and possible threats than ever before. So as not to become a victim of a digital crime, users are more thorough when choosing an e-wallet app or digital banking.

 

These challenges can be addressed by making the solution that would be compliant with e-money and banking directives and regulations (GDPR, FCA, PCI DSS, PSD2 and numerous other regulations). Furthermore, you should pay attention to built-in security features and flows to protect customer data input, transactions and payments:

 

• KYC, AML;
  
  
• Multi-factor authentication (2FA);
  
  
• Biometric authentication;
  
  
• Role-based access control (RBAC) managed by authorized admins;
  
  
• Authorization codes and unique login ids;
  
  
• Audit trail / action log;
  
  
• On the spot notifications and alerts;
  
  
• Behavior analysis;
  
  
• NFC inserted sim cards;
  
  
• Complete end-to-end encryption;
  
  
• Multi-signature transactions;
  
  
• Idle time-outs.
  
  

How to make an outstanding product?

 

With an extremely high competition on the Fintech market it is mission critical to make a solution that would truly stand out. From our point of view, there are several aspects that should be taken into account by ambitious product teams:

 

• Quality of the software;
  
  
• Personalization;
  
  
• Friendly and intuitive UX;
  
  
• High-level security;
  
  
• Agility and fast innovations adoption.
  
  

What are the ways to build a mobile banking product?

 

If you have already defined your product key descriptives and positioning, the market and functionality to provide, it is time to start designing and building the product. We outline several main options to get the Fintech product that mainly vary by investments, time-to-market and tech expertise required.

 

Firstly, you can build it in-house if you have a full product development team preferably with profound experience in Fintech. In case you don’t have an internal development team, hiring suitable professionals and their initial onboarding will take about 2-5 months. This option will obviously be the costliest and long-term which is usually not a good fit for small companies and startups. On the other side, you’ll get the fully crafted product which will be further maintained by a dedicated team.

 

Another option is to outsource the product development to specialized development agencies like Velmie. The potential service providers differ by locations, size, industry expertise and price. These companies have the knowhow and software capabilities to ensure the necessary compliance, security, data protection and usually provide advisory services. Any Fintech client coming on board will have access to pre-built frameworks that allow the business to get their digital offering up and running in no time.

 

The third option is partnering with financial SaaS provider, also known as white-label digital banking platforms vendors. It is an ideal option for those who need the fastest possible time-to-market and lower price, compared with custom development from scratch.