Fintech businesses, by their very nature, handle sensitive data and take on a lot of responsibility. The natural conclusion then should be that it’s best to handle fintech product development within the company, among trusted employees, right? Wrong. And here’s why.
What is fintech?
Fintech is a crossover space between finance and technology, allowing for innovation and disruption in an area usually limited by regulations and challenging market conditions. Because of how quickly fintech is growing, many experts call it the future of payments and believe it will positively impact the economy, both globally and locally.
Already, companies like Bitt make banking more accessible through the use of cryptocurrency, while businesses like Creditspring set out to revolutionise the way loans work, making them more predictable and flexible.
The advantages of outsourcing and team augmentation for fintech
The most important benefit of working with a professional development agency is their level of experience. Whether you choose to cooperate with a full team or specific developers, they should be vetted experts who have rich programming experience and easy access to organizational know-how of a company which has already delivered successful fintech products. This is incredibly valuable, as they will understand the common challenges and opportunities present in the sector, and have strategies for overcoming or leveraging them. It’s a great way to acquire years of experience and technical know-how into your project with minimal effort.
The second benefit is team scalability. Companies like iRonin.IT offer flexible involvement, which means that the number of team members working on your project can change over time. We do this to help our clients limit costs and improve efficiency. Sometimes, a regulatory or design issue crops up, and developers need to wait for its resolution. We can simply limit their involvement during this time, and the client won’t have to pay for their team twiddling their thumbs.
Finally, security. Intuitively, you might expect an internal team to be more secure. After all, you would be working closely with them, monitoring their progress and controlling what hardware or software they use. But the truth about security threats is that they usually happen due to human error - and human error can be most effectively mitigated with a good, well-established process. Development agencies tend to have much more experience with unpredictable events during development, so they are better prepared for their occurrence. Additionally, they tend to be highly skilled experts, unlikely to make rookie mistakes. This is why your fintech project should be more secure with an outsourced team.
Technologies that work well for fintech
Over the years of supporting fintech clients, we’ve built a list of recommendations in terms of what technologies can be the most valuable and effective in this sector.
For web apps, mature frameworks are a must. We suggest Ruby on Rails, Python with Django, and Go. These programming languages and frameworks have been around for years, have thriving communities, and are robust enough to handle financial systems.
If you want to reach the highest number of users possible - especially in less wealthy countries or regions - a mobile app is a must. In the west, mobile apps have an important role, as well: they bring finance closer to everyday life, allowing for better experiences and more engagement.
Blockchain, smart contracts and cryptocurrencies remain a fintech staple, allowing the finance and banking sector to move beyond the status quo. Smart contracts offer independence, speed of operations and higher security, while blockchain remains a flexible solution that’s useful for much more than cryptocurrency.
Advanced analytics and data processing power solutions such as:
- analyzing user’s operations,
- better user experience due to analytics,
- automating financial operations and administrative work,
- fraud detection.
These can be incredibly important to your business growth, if done right.
Finally, security is a top priority for fintech, which is why effective monitoring and alerting systems are crucial parts of any fintech software.
How to pick the right team or developers for your fintech project
Whether you decide on the dedicated development team or team extension cooperation model, make sure to work with a company, not freelancers. A company will have better processes, higher standards, and an operations team to help you work out the collaboration formalities. They will also be willing to accept more responsibility.
Step 1: trust
To choose the right technology partner for your fintech project, first look at the company’s experience in the fintech sector. Does their portfolio include successful apps and platforms, with positive testimonials? Great! They are most likely trustworthy.
Step 2: company fit
To successfully deliver a product, you and your team need to be comfortable cooperating with your partner. Make sure that the company you’re considering will carry their weight. They should have:
- a strong focus on high-quality software development process,
- established QA practices (including code reviews, manual testing and test automation),
- a solid definition of done,
- a good vetting process for hiring developers.
Aside from all this, their communication flow should match yours well enough that you’ll have good access to people crucial for the project.
This part is fairly subjective. You might prefer your partner to be in the same time zone as you, or you might want to take advantage of time zone differences to begin each day by reviewing the work done by your external team while you slept through the night at iRonin.IT, we’ve done both and they’re both viable options. The same is true for preferred communication channels (e.g. Slack vs Microsoft Teams). And remember to keep an open mind - it’s an opportunity to learn from the experience of others.
Ready to get your fintech project started? Let’s go!
iRonin.IT has delivered several fintech apps related to loans, cryptocurrency solutions, and more.