Consumers have begun to use fintech solutions in their daily lives in double numbers over the past five years. One of the main reasons people chose mobile over traditional banking and contactless over cash was the COVID-19 pandemic. Fintech is becoming more and more popular, making it a competitive field. To stand out from the competition, you need to defeat them in almost aspects. A fintech company must have a mobile app since, without physical offices and banks, the app serves as its “face”.
Surf has developed mobile apps for the fintech industry over the past ten years. We’ve worked with several banks and crypto exchanges recently. Start an in-house development team or maybe you can hire offshore developers to build your mobile app for customers if you’re a fintech company.
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Find out why it might be more effective to fintech development outsourcing in 2021. This discussion will cover the advantages and disadvantages of this approach, along with tips for hiring a Fintech expert software development agency.
Benefits & Disadvantages of Fintech Development Outsourcing
A development company can handle the entire project through a contractual agreement rather than hiring full-time developers through outsourcing development. What do you think is better: outsourcing fintech software or set it up in-house? What else needs to be considered?
Benefits
Save money
Developers’ salaries are determined by their location. Therefore, while US and Canadian developers charge $90-110 per hour, developers from many other regions, including Eastern Europe (Russia, Ukraine), South America (Brazil, Argentina), Asia (India, Philippines) charge significantly lower prices, $18-40/hr, even if the quality of the code is the of same quality, if not better. Development teams can comfortably work remotely, collaborating on collaboration platforms and scheduling meetings remotely via Skype or Zoom.
So, employing developers offshore can effortlessly reduce your development costs by half if you start a fintech company in the US. This dedicated article can teach you a lot about the recommended countries for hiring developers.
Latest technologies
Fintech developers are rarely exposed to the level of experience that in-house developers get since they work on fewer projects, so hiring them is advantageous. Currently, developers can create cross-platform apps from a single codebase with only a few small changes using trending cross-platform frameworks.
Cross-platform development generally costs less than native development, even though higher hourly rates. That’s because you’ll only need one talented team of expert developers.
As an initial adopter of Flutter’s cross-platform framework, released in 2017, Surf, a native mobile app developer using Kotlin and Swift, developed native mobile apps initially for Android and iOS. We first used Flutter for banking apps in Russia for Rosbank’s corporate clients. The client saved a substantial amount of money by choosing the right cross-platform development framework.
The Dart language, also used in Flutter, provides improved security since the code is amassed into an unreadable format. By contrast, solutions are written in Java, Kotlin or React Native simplifying reverse rendering and making the app much reliable and secure. In 2020, Surf’s Rosbank app won a Tagline Award, the highest Russian award for collaborating projects in Banking, Finance, and Insurance.
Focus on the business’s core functions
Instead of creating apps, fintech companies provide financial services to individual and corporate clients. You don’t need to establish a development department, invest in HR processes, or hire more managers, so why incur these costs? Furthermore, after the initial version is developed, some developers will likely have no tasks at all.
There may be full-time employees on board, but they will need to be kept until next big project has been completed, or they may need to leave. You don’t have to hire or manage staff since you’ll be paying for the work that has already been completed.
Easy project transfer
An experienced development team approaching a client’s project always remember that it could be later entrusted to any skilled team. Hence, every structure, code, and feature is easily recognizable.
In companies that use widely acknowledged practices and thoroughly document them, it is less likely that an app will be developed without adequate documentation despite being in-house. For example, if the newcomer rejects the project and does not learn how everything actually works, they may find it difficult to understand.
They use reputable solutions in every aspect of Surf’s development programs, and our architecture standard is the industry’s standard. Among testers, Gherkin is an easy language to understand when writing autotests. During the development process, a project can be transferred to a talented in-house team seamlessly.
Disadvantages
Less control
Remote working with fintech developers has its advantages, but it can also have some downsides, and one of them is the lack of control over the development process. Likely, your managers do not understand the roles and responsibilities and their working conditions since developers are engaged and managed by some other company.
The development process will be slowed down as a result, negatively affecting its quality. In most cases, poor communication is to blame for losing control. Create a plan for meetings and template for reports, and select team members who will report and monitor the development process.
Less involvement
The in-house staff of your business will be more familiar with your unique business’ values and requirements than the contracted staff. This is largely because they chose to work for you. When fintech developers are outsourced, you might find that they are not as involved in your project as they should, resulting in a subpar project. Suppose you are searching for a fintech software developer. In that case, it is always recommended to find the right one with an excellent track record, a few good references from previous happy clients, and a similar mentality as your own. Surf’s page on Clutch.co is one of the most famous resources for client reviews of software developers.
How to Outsource Developers Like A Pro
What You Need To Know About Fintech Development Outsourcing Developers
Several aspects of fintech app development warrant extra attention if you decide to outsource this task. Let’s discuss them briefly here.
Relevant expertise
Particular knowledge and experience are required for every app, specifically for fintech software. In order to operate efficiently, finance apps need to process user input quickly. If a trader’s investing app freezes, they might not be able to sell stock in time and lose money. Would they still use it?
Apps have become the main (often the only) means to do so whenever banks and brokerage firms interact with potential customers. In comparison, bad app experiences make your customers turn to your competitors. Surf recommends that you choose a partner with much better experience and a good portfolio of some relevant projects if you are looking to outsource the development of your fintech app.
Surf has created several fintech apps, such as the Twim cryptocurrency trading app, over the last few years. Their attention was particularly focused on the quote charts of the Twim app and how fast they updated. For regular investors and day traders to use the quotes, the data must be accurate and show real-time values. In order to visualize financial data, they used TradingView’s library. For the charts to properly display on iOS and Android devices, they implemented native wrappers on Swift and Kotlin.
Same values and culture
You might happenstance an issue with hiring offshore development employees that is almost impossible with in-house employees; due to cultural differences and work approaches, the speed and ofcourse the quality of the working process drop. Differences in time zones usually contribute to cross-cultural problems. The communication is directed via email due to the inconvenience of conference calls or instant messages. A team becomes unmanageable; you might not get timely project updates, etc.
You may be interested in finding a talented development team in Poland, Russia, or Ukraine if you are a US-based company or startup. Developers in these countries have excellent English skills, good coding skills and reasonable hourly rates. Therefore, misunderstandings and misses to deadlines are less possibly to happen.
Security
Fintech apps need to be secure due to the significant defeats they experience from cybercrime each year. The most common forms of cyberattacks on apps are infrastructure infringements, illegal apps, man-in-the-middle attacks, and of course, clickjacking. These attacks result from faulty code, poor cryptography, compromised data storage, and poor authentication. Find out more about banking apps’ security issues in a more comprehensive article.
Make sure you know what kind of security solution an external developer has executed in their earlier projects before engaging them. Fintech apps should have the following security features:
- SSL and HTTPS are used for all connections.
- The use of two-factor authentication via SMS or email that provides a single-use code.
- Apps that display money figures for onlookers to see.
- Users have the option of wiping data from their phones if they lose or steal them.
- Surf utilizes the efficient security solutions to keep your all sensitive data protected users because they know that security is the cornerstone of fintech.
Transparency
It is necessary to retain the workflow transparent when outsourcing app development to avoid hidden costs and delays. Before starting, ensure that you sign a service level agreement (SLA) with your developer.
Data management & recovery processes, disaster recovery action plans, and deadlines related to every stage of the development process should be outlined in the SLA. Asana, Jira, Trello and others are some of the most commonly used tools for project management and test track.
Conclusion
App developers are in high demand as the fintech industry evolves and more companies adopt a “mobile-first” strategy. You can hire affordable talent to develop your app if you outsource application development. You save your management and HR departments from a host of hassles when you hire an external contractor.
A potential contractor must have relevant fintech knowledge, the same significance and culture as his or her client, and the latest technologies. Surf has over a decade of experience developing mobile apps and has worked on various successful fintech projects, such as a cryptocurrency trading platform and efficient mobile apps for banks.
