How Fintech Apps Are Changing the Financial Landscape

The world has moved on from finances and technologies a long ago – we now have fintech apps as the new normal. Fintech’s core philosophy suggests that every customer as well as corporate should be able to enjoy automated, secure and timely delivery of financial services. And like every other sector, mobile apps are at the forefront of the fintech revolution and its underlying philosophy.

Being the advocates of emerging technologies disrupting industrial sectors, here is our detailed overview on the contribution of fintech apps to the fastest-changing corporate sector, ideas for more successful fintech products, their development cost and process and their revenue models.

What is a fintech app?

A fintech application is a mobile app or software program that simplifies the delivery of a financial service. The intended user for a fintech app can be a consumer, a household user, or a producer, for example an online business or an enterprise-grade corporation.

How Fintech App Works

Fintech apps usually deal with services like digital banking, credit lending and money investing, instant online payments and Peer to Peer payments.

These fintech products usually partner up with different banks and payment systems, shopping brands and brokerage houses. Then they provide financial services and earn either a membership or transaction commission.

For a successful fintech app, the app owner needs to ensure end-to-end information security, strong app testing and data confidentiality.

Benefits Of Fintech Products

Top fintech app features and security solutions are highly advantageous at different levels and for different users of financial services.

• Rapid growth

This growth factor is a mutual benefit for different stakeholders: fintech producers as well as consumers. While fintech businesses can automate and accelerate the delivery of financial services, fintech users can enjoy secure transactions. Hence, fintech apps are popular examples of industrial domain.

• Technological revolution

Fintech apps are a means of digitizing the most important services required by every other business sector – banking, money landing, wealth management and blockchain infrastructure. These fintech solutions are at the forefront of technological revolution.

• Wealth management

Most of these apps that you found in the list show you your real-time account balance, whether they are in flat currency or crypto. You can manage your wealth, and make financial decisions on your fingertips.

• Risk management

These financial apps, especially the ones with decentralized architectures are highly secure and private. This means only limited stakeholders are authorized to view the information. Plus, there is diversity in these apps. You can choose to take limited risks, and optimize your wealth for maximum returns.

• Investment opportunities

Coinbase, for example, is decentralized exchange that helps you maintain a crypto-based portfolio and trade currencies as and when you want. So, these innovative fintech products open endless investment opportunities for a huge global audience.

• Financial inclusion

As I said earlier, fintech products allow for more, diverse investment opportunities. And that is one of the primary sources of financial inclusion. NFT marketplaces like OpenSea and Rarible, digital wallets like MetaMask and digital payment systems like Hyperwallet are available throughout the world, regardless of the socio-economic status of a country. Now if this is not real financial inclusion, what else is?

• Competitive transactions

The availability of so many financial apps signals entrepreneurs and other consumers to seek the most affordable transaction platform. In real-time, users can compare the transactions costs on different applications like Square, PayPal, Stripe, Moneylion, Chime and Revoult and decide which of these is more economic.

Top 6 Fintech Apps to Check-in 2022

Here are the best fintech products and solutions that are disrupting not only the financial services sector, but have also revolutionized how payments were sent and accepted in businesses.  

1.  PayPal

PayPal is one of the oldest, yet strongest fintech app available for consumers and businesses. It started as a small fintech startup for digital payments and now has 325 million active account holders worldwide. It has expanded significantly and now empowers the world’s financial deliveries with its four subsidiary fintech solutions including Venno, Braintree, Hyperwallet, and Xoom.

Talking about its specific fintech app features, it has 2 Factor Authentication guaranteeing the security of payments, cross platform architecture and availability on web, iOS and Android, and dedicated user experience for individual consumers and businesses.

2. Chime

Chime is a mobile banking app with options for checking accounts, saving accounts and credit building. It allows users with options like direct deposits and debit cards.

The best Chime feature is its no overdraft policy for upto $200 cash withdrawals and debit card purchases. It also sends out push notifications daily for balance alerts and transaction reminders. Like PayPal, Chime also secures the in-app activity by 2 Factor Authentication, Face ID and biometric verification.

3. Moneylion

Moneylion is fintech app that lends money to consumers, provides investment services and financial advisory. Users can request advance payments 2 days ahead, request for bigger credits, get interest-free loans through Instacash, make purchases and invest the change in the built-in investment portal.

4. Coinbase

Coinbase is a decentralized application where users can buy and sell cryptocurrencies, schedule their trading for daily, weekly and monthly speculations, and link other dApps to their blockchain accounts.

While Coinbase started as a measure to internationally sell and buy Bitcoins, it has now expanded to become one of the biggest trading platforms for a lot of popular and emerging cryptocurrencies. It has integration with innumerable platforms like websites, apps and shopping marketplaces where users may need to send and receive in cryptocurrency.

5. Wealthfront

Being an investment app at its core, Wealthfront has everything from portfolio customizations to AI investment recommendations to automated money rolling to analytics and cash withdrawal options.

It allows users to borrow cash without credit checks on low interest. Plus, it has different account options for users to want to use ATMs. The main feature of Wealthfront is its ability to reinvest dividends automatically based on user interests and preferences, and lowering the tax charges that would otherwise incur if a user was investing via brokerage firms.

6. Brigit

Brigit is a credit building fintech solution for users who would like to adjust their paydays, establish a credit score and receive personalized recommendations on saving money and avoiding overdrafts.

The app has another, unique fintech app feature that’s not available in any of apps we just discussed: earning more through part and full-time jobs. Yes, Brigit app has built-in job board that helps app users land on part-time and full-time jobs as per their convenience. When they can earn more, they can save more, and can build a better credit score.

It sends out notifications to avoid overdrafts and generates personalized insights into improving users’ budgeting and managing personal finance.

Brigit is basically a freemium app. It has a free basic version that generates insights and requests credit upto $250. The premium version starts at $9.99 per month and has features like theft insurance.

Trending Fintech App Ideas For 2022

• Decentralized exchanges
• Online investment portals
• Income and expense calculators
• Budget management apps
• Blockchain apps like NFT marketplaces
• Crowdfunding applications
• Peer to Peer payment apps

Top 6 Fintech App Features

• Account balance viewing
• Investment features
• 2 Factor Authentication and biometric verification
• End to end encryption
• Push notifications, alerts and personalized recommendations
• Reward systems and loyalty programs

Fintech App Development Cost For Different Categories

A fintech app can cost anywhere between $50,000 to $300,000 depending upon the complexity of design and number of features.

Here is a quick rundown of different types of fintech apps and their estimated costs:

• A simple fintech app for budget management and personal finance $10,000 to $15,000.
• A mid-level financial app for local tax calculations $20,000 to $100,000.
• A digital banking app with multiple user profiles and expansive back-end costs $50,000 to $150,000.
• An investment app costs $30,000 to $65,000.
• A blockchain-based fintech app costs $40,000 to 100,000.
• A cloud-based fintech app costs $20,000 to $75,000.

*While these are quick figures for a rough idea, you can always book a free cost estimation call and discuss your budget and revenue expectations from our business analysts.

How Do Fintech Apps Make Money?

Most fintech apps make money through these four popular monetization models:

• Free services and ads: this is the most popular monetization model through which a lot of free apps make money. Your app is free to download and use, and shows advertisements powered by Google Play or App store. You earn for every ad your user views. There are different revenue structures for banner ads and video ads.
• Freemium version: the basic version of these apps is free. You can ask your users to pay a subscription or free for an ad-free version, and to use some advanced features. To utilize this revenue model, you can also put a transaction cap, or an account value cap. Then charge your users an account fee based on their transaction or account value.
• Premium subscriptions: these are paid applications that charge a periodic membership fee to keep using the services of a fintech app. Premium apps usually cost an average $7 per month but you can choose to set a different price for your app depending on its scope and features.
• Commission structure: in this revenue model, an app deducts a service fee for every transaction a user makes through the app. This commission could be a flat transaction charge or a percentage of the total transaction.

How To Build A Fintech App?

Here is the quickest answer on how to create a fintech app.

• Decide a fintech app category and niche.
• Write a business plan allocating  app development Chicago and marketing budget, estimated revenues and no. of estimated downloads
• List down the features you want to add.
• Create a development strategy including the platform you want to develop for. You may want to go for Android development, iOS development, modern blockchain app development or cross-platform app development.
• Hire a development team remotely or pick staff augmentation
• Decide app milestones, and deadlines.
• Thoroughly test the app for performance and navigation, security and data retention, and technical factors.
• Launch the app.

Wrapping Up…

Fintech has had transformative impacts on the existing financial and corporate infrastructure. All the more so with cloud, encryption and blockchain integrated with app architectures. Basically, all these technologies combined have made access to financial services as simple as signing up for an email address. And that’s the secret behind the success of several fintech products and solutions – that once started as small companies and now are generating millions and billions in their annual revenues