According to statistics, today, about 2.043 million people around the world use online banking services. And by 2024, this figure will grow to 2.551.8 million. Does this mean that banks should make every effort to create software solutions that meet the needs of a modern client and transfer some offline bank branch services to the digital plane? Definitely, it does.
With a financial application for clients, your financial organization or bank can boost customer loyalty, increase the total level of income, and reduce the overall cost of services. Let’s discuss the specifics of such products in detail below and figure out how to create a mobile banking app step-by-step.
Let’s start our overview from the banking apps market research. According to Statista, by 2022, nearly 80% of all millennials in the US are expected to become regular banking apps users. This means that the new generation almost cannot imagine its existence without such digital solutions.
As for the benefits for you as a bank or financial institution, you’ll profit from an app as it is clearly visible that the global capitalization of the banking application market is growing rapidly every year. In 2015, it was only $0.6 billion, and by 2020, it reached $3.6 billion. Is this not an indicator of the fundamental need for an application for each bank? The answer is obvious.
So instead of being puzzled by the potential need for such a product, we should rather look at the main trends in this niche.
What are the main trends in the development of banking applications? According to Businessinsider and our research based on top mobile app in the niche (read the Top-tier Examples of Mobile Bank Applications section below), here they are:
Integration with third-party services. Finally, you can offer your clients a flexible system of discounts when using your partners’ services.
A well-designed mobile banking application will provide your business with many benefits, including:
Increasing the number of communication channels. The mobile app is another channel of interaction with customers, which, on the one hand, makes banking transactions easier for them and, on the other hand, increases your profits.
Finally, let's take a quick look at five mobile apps provided by the most famous banks in the world:
TD Bank Mobile Banking App. This application has a standard set of features with all kinds of money transfer options and excellent analytical tools. And, of course, its creators did not forget to provide integration with geolocation tools to find the nearest ATM. The app has 4.8 stars in the App Store and 214,357 votes in all.
Are you ready to provide your bank's clients with a fundamentally new level of service? Our specialists will implement any of your ideas using the most modern approaches to software development and the most advanced technologies. Contact us to estimate your project right now.
Formally, there are five main types of mobile banking applications.
Modern mobile banking solutions, as a rule, include the properties of several of the above applications at once.
One of the most popular banks in India, HDFC Bank, offers a fairly comprehensive overview of basic features for a mobile banking application. As for our experience, we can highlight a slightly different set of standard features that should be present in an average internet-only bank:
What features will be nice to have in the mobile app of your financial institution? Let's find out:
What are the main reasons why creating your own bank application can be difficult? According to the experience of many of our colleagues, here they are:
Tackle all the above challenges by choosing a trusted digital partner to work with. Epam Anywhere Business has been cooperating with the world's leading financial institutions for a long time, and now we are ready to take on your project.
To make a bank application, you may need to use the following technologies depending on the platform you choose.
For cross-platform development:
For hybrid app development:
For iOS development:
For Android development:
Now is the time to find out how to create a mobile banking app.
Before you start a mobile bank development, it is essential to conduct marketing research that would highlight the leaders and outsiders of the market, as well as identify their strengths and weaknesses. Going forward, this will help you compile a win-win list of specifications for your application.
This stage usually takes a month or two. To optimize it, you can use generally accepted strategies, for example, SWOT analysis - research aimed at identifying and assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the project, its opportunities and potential threats. Opportunity is defined as something that gives a project a chance to achieve something new: win new customers, introduce new technology, rebuild business processes; in turn, threats are factors that can damage the project, deprive it of its existing advantages: the emergence of new competitors, substitute products, etc.
In order for the prototype to reflect the functionality of the future product, you need to conduct a number of primary studies:
When it comes to mobile banking applications, it is obvious that this type of project should have much more security guarantors than other public applications. So to ensure proper compliance, you need to hire a team that is experienced in creating similar products.
For example, for banking software, the list of regulatory security requirements (such as GDPR, PSD2, PCI DSS, CCPA, etc.) is significantly longer than in the case of ordinary applications. This means that before starting to work on a product, it is important to check whether the planned functionality complies with all these policies.
Speaking specifically about the design of mobile banking applications, it is very important for them to provide web accessibility, which, by the way, is regulated at the legislative level in some countries. Most web accessibility laws are based on WCAG 2.0 guidelines.
Which software tools developers will use depends on the functionality of the application and the chosen mobile OS. We reviewed the standard solutions above, in the Performable Tech Stack You Need to Create a Banking Application section.
After the final approval of what is already done, developers begin to implement the application functionality. As the separate stages of work on the application are completed, it is tested many times.
In order for the product to meet your expectations as much as possible, it is important to regularly interact with the development team and give them feedback. This will reduce the number of edits and speed up team workflows. Depending on the complexity of the functionality, product development can take from three months to six months.
After successful testing, the product is launched into release and is accompanied by IT specialists from the developer's side so that in case of problems, they are promptly eliminated.
If we talk about public applications, they are uploaded into Google Play and App Store, depending on the OS for which they were created. It is important to remember here that at the stage of transferring the application to public access, the costs do not end: you will periodically have to pay for server capacity, support for some technologies, integration with payment gateways, etc.
As the client’s business develops and market requirements grow, the application can be optimized and supplemented with new functionality.
On what aspects the application can be optimized, a new marketing research will help you find out (see the Step 1). Thus, the entire software development process can be considered cyclical.
Want to create a one-stop solution for your business and increase the loyalty of your customers? Contact EPAM Anywhere Business! We will entrust your project to a team of the best specialists in the fintech industry to create a cutting-edge product.
So how much does it cost to make a banking app? The cost of your future mobile banking application depends on:
To build a bank application and get a smoothly working product, choosing a development team that clearly understands what and why they are doing is essential. The right team will guarantee you:
Even though developing a mobile banking app may seem complex, a small team of 10-12 people can handle it. It will most likely include the following specialists in the right amount (in general, this is a standard set of specialists who have to work on the creation of mobile software):
Note that this statement is more relevant for mobile games than for mobile banking software, which means that the choice in favor of cross-platform or hybrid development is obvious in all cases, except for those when the main target audience of the application is users of a specific mobile platform. In a nutshell, hybrid or cross-platform solutions are cheaper and have a shorter time to market, but native ones have better performance and UX.
If you doubt the choice of functionality for your future neobank application or have a limited budget, it may be better to start with MVP development. In addition to the above key features, we recommend that you also consider the following features:
Also, technical support and maintenance services significantly affect the budget of your digital product. In particular, there are a number of applications that need to get back to normal operation as quickly as possible in the event of a problem. Due to the urgency, such support services can be quite expensive.
So how long does it take to build a banking app, and how much will it cost?
According to the complexity of the final product and the development process, the budget for banking app development can be around $100k-500k. But when it comes to cooperation with an in-house team, it can grow up to $1 million. As for MVPs, they may cost only $100k, depending on the development team you choose. Note that all these rates are applicable to the services of our colleagues from the USA, Australia, Canada, and Western Europe.
If we talk about the time needed to develop an online banking application, in the case of MVP, it can take around 700 hours, and in the case of a full-fledged product — about 1250 hours.
Let's summarize this data again in the table below, focusing on the average developer rates depending on their location (Note that in the case of India, many clients mention the poor quality of the final product and inconvenient interaction with contractors):
Note that all the given prices are approximate and vary from project to project. Contact EPAM Anywhere to get an estimation for your banking app.
Epam Anywhere Business creates mobile banking applications in the best way. Fintech is one of the main areas of our specialization; here, we use advanced technologies and innovative approaches to fully meet the needs of both our customers and end-users, as well as to ensure compliance with all existing industry regulations.
Let's take a look at two projects from the fintech niche that demonstrate our experience in developing a banking application.
We have been working with ImageNPay since 2018. We have taken responsibility for developing a startup powered by digital payments that eliminate the need for plastic credit and debit cards. When we decided to start a banking app for the client, we used the following technologies:
We are proud that now our projects not only help entrepreneurs achieve new business goals but also bring real benefits to the environment.
Since this project is a startup, the main goal of its founders is to offer an environmentally friendly and budgetary alternative to plastic cards - the EPAM team managed to achieve a 100% result. Now the app has a 5-star rating on the App Store, which means that real users are satisfied with it.
The world-renowned bank Citi, with over 200 million customers in over 160 countries, has announced a competition to develop a mobile banking application involving 3,000+ developers. As a result, we won this competition and soon started to create a personalized banking platform called CitiConcierge. The main idea of this software is to provide interaction between the bank's clients and its employees in the digital plane.
The main technological solution that we used in the process of working on this fintech app is Gimbal beacons connected to local Wi-Fi, as well as tools for native iOS development.
The main goal of this collaboration - to create a cutting-edge, consumer-focused application for Citi’s Digital Banking Platforms from scratch - was achieved. Now our team is working to integrate the solution into their Smart Branch.
As you can see, a multi-functional online bank:
If you want to build your own banking app, please EPAM Anywhere Business. We will create a banking application in Android or iOS platform for your own business needs. Note that our development platform doesn’t just specialize in the fintech niche as digital partners of the world's leading financial companies. We are the ones who set new trends in this industry and use the technologies of the future today.
Our technical experience and practice will be the key to your business success.
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