Companies engaged in Financial Services have unique needs. The designed systems need to have stable and secure architecture, perform under peak loads with minimum latency, work with sophisticated algorithms, and have seamless integrations with other financial institutions or interfaces. What are the key aspects that you should look for when designing a custom software for financial services?
The finance sector is not untouched by digital disruption. How people interact with fintech systems is going through a sea change requiring redesign or a completely fresh approach to solving problems. Whether you are paying for swim lessons for your child through Venmo or picking up Thai food and paying through Square, you are engaging in systems that are changing our ways of making transactions. When the world requires you to build a competitive and highly regulated finance industry, you must be willing to look at the big picture. It’s not just about driving digital disruption but also making sure that you are developing a product that is in total compliance with the latest regulatory needs.
Also read: Role of DevOps in Custom Software Development
Driving the Demand in Custom Software for Financial Services
The continual evolution of consumer behavior, fostered by the influx of digital services, has triggered a steady increase in the demand for custom software for financial sector. The world expected the Financial Services Application Market to be over $103 billion last year. It is evident that there is a need to develop applications that compliant, risk-free, and data-driven, focusing on the consumer instead of only on the platform’s efficiency. Therefore, when organizations aspire to transform themselves, custom made application is the right approach. An application that reflects the core ethos of the business and supports the business’s unique requirements. To drive this transformation, applications that support digitization are consumer-centric and focus on core competencies that the developers should design.
1. Focus Areas
Firstly, custom software for financial services need to have scalability, flexibility, and customer focus. The solutions should have an innovative take on the financial services space; the focus should be on developing robust and user-friendly solutions.
2. Scalable
Secondly, organizations don’t pay too much attention to the overall scale initally; this is especially common for a startup just finding their feet. However, scalability becomes a thorny subject when they start to grow. Design with a foundation of scalable technologies and a microservices architecture.
3. Secure
Thirdly, cybersecurity is one of the most important areas which needs focus. It’s of the most significant concern areas. Integration with multiple financial institutions, cross border payments, mobile facing interfaces open up areas making the application vulnerable. When you are the custodian of customers’ data, you run a significant risk of designing an application that may have weak defenses.
4. Maintainable
Your future releases and product enhancements depend on how you have coded the first release. Whether or not you followed the best practices. A maintainable application is one that will incur the least effort to support frequent releases.
5. Mobile
At least 63% of users have a finance app. Most applications carry both the web and mobile to ensure maximum reachability and value proposition. A core design philosophy with a mobile interface as a roadmap will deliver benefits in the long run.
6. Integrations
Most applications would need to work with other platforms and applications in the ecosystem. This aspect is essential not just to have a desirable system but also to deliver critical functional requirements. Therefore, choose open interfaces to improve integration prospects. Design the system to collaborate and share data across other applications, ensuring reduced data duplication and fragmentation. Thus, when you maintain them as independent systems, you do the manual entry by integration which is time-consuming and costly. More importantly, these systems often produce wrong information due to data duplication and fragmentation.
7. Reporting
Lastly, the software should support easy export and import of the data. It should allow the users to manipulate, slice or dice the data. The users report the ability to gain meaningful insights from data collected as a critical metric when deciding on a solution; with the deluge of data these days, it’s easy to get inundated with data points that may or may not be relevant. Therefore, the system should allow data to be compiled from multiple sources and convert into relevant insights automatically. Reporting is real-time, scheduling, and carrying out what-if analysis are some of the essential aspects.
Benefits of a Custom Solution
Apart from the visible benefits of time and cost, which comes in opting for a custom solution, one should also focus on the chosen partner’s design philosophy. Experience plays a key role and will save hundreds of iterations down the line. Some of the key benefits of going with a custom solution are:
- Firstly, it allows you to drive comprehensive integration with other systems your organization uses.
- Reduce maintenance costs.
- Improve automation
- Better Collaboration
- Enhanced Security
- Customized accessibility
- Better ability to address custom compliance requirements.
- An experienced partner can help better Understand Customer Behaviors
- Access to Industry experts
- Enhance customer satisfaction.
- Create a scalable solution based on needs
- Gain from reliable, repeatable, proven methodologies.
- Have access to dedicated teams.
Conclusion
Take a step back and evaluate your current system. Are you getting the most value from it? Only 44% of organizations feel that their finance is equipped to produce meaningful data. Many believe that they are not able to translate the collected data into actionable insights. With the rapid change of pace around advanced analytics and automation, ensure the building’s product is aligned with your organization’s strategic goals.