Per a recently published global report on mobile app analytics, 65% of iPhone users install at least one app every month. 30% of people in China and South Korea break the record by installing four or more apps per month. India and Brazil also have high app installation rates in various categories.
Clearly, the current mobile stats are going to break every record in the years to come. While we have acquired smart shopping, smart living, smart sporting, there’s a new thing called smart financing that has metamorphosed the banking and finance sector. Mobile apps have made things simpler and easily accessible for bankers and financiers as well as the users. Finance app development is embarking on a futuristic mission where they can automate the internal processes and personal finances of users.
Over the years, we have seen products and services that are designed to help customers automate the processes of saving dollars and paying down debts. Because consumers demand more ease for engagement, financial institutions are left with no option but to serve their customers with innovation in technology. And if you’re not doing that, your finance company is on the verge of shutting down. Conventional and manual processes are no admired.
Today, everything that a consumer wants is to perform majority of their official and personal tasks (apart from bathing, brushing or defecating, which might be possible in the future) via their smartphones. And thus, we have an app for everything. Finance is the most picked up industry by mobile technology experts overtaking the traditional global financial processes and implementing financial liberalization, institutional and regulatory upgrades and technology changes.
Some of the key areas and various ways in which mobile app development is transforming the finance sector are:
As technology is fueling our overall growth, they are linking us better with our bank accounts. Customers can directly connect their accounts on their smartphone and perform each and every task just on their phone, which previously they had to visit the bank for or use their desktops. Money transfer, opening or closing another savings account like FD, RD, see the full list of their debits/credits, their bank statement, change their personal details, everything is manageable from a mobile application.
This has certainly brought stability in financing as users can perform currency transfers via messenger apps and pay-on-the-go.
A giant change in the banking and finance is going to happen by the next year. Open banking is a new directive, to be introduced in the UK that will require largest banks in the UK to give access to their data to third parties, precisely for the current account transactions and the location ATMs.
In advance to this, an Open Up Challenge was launched in February 2017 for the various leading international banks including Barclays, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds and many fintech startups. This program is envisioned to inspire the creation of finance apps and automated tools for Small-medium enterprises, which will allow businesses to sign up to its services directly from their business bank account. Open banking will also liberalize the access to hugely rich source of real-time data, that was previously monopolized by banks that failed to innovate.
Financial services create more customer data than any other industry, and thus, this open banking concept can be a lot beneficial in the sector.
Also read: 5 Ways Technology is Reshaping Finance Industry
Yet again an important way of managing finances through mobile apps is the contactless payments like Apple Pay, Samsung Pay- a smart way for consumers to buy products in stores without having to pay cash or via their debit/credit cards. An app on their phone through a secure biometric wireless transaction can pay the bills. This also has somehow contributed in saving paper by not printing any payment receipts, which may sound petty a thing but imagine if you can save that small slip paper on each customer, how much paper can you save.
Contactless payments also protect customer’s credit/debit cards to be tracked by any machine, providing an encrypted and secured transaction in the world where the number of malware and hackers are growing at the same rate technology is progressing.
While banking and finance has completely changed to what it was ten years from now, consumers are still not sure about the security in digital methods, especially the elderly people. However, cloud applications and software-as-a-service solutions are making secure and scalable transition across multiple channels.
Most reputed finance institutions including banks, insurance agencies, investment companies, credit unions, brokerages are beginning to use Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions to quickly create scalable user-friendly apps that can increase customer engagement, personalize communication between the customer and the bank/investment agency and can help customers with need-based financial planning.
Though typically ‘Green Financing’ aims at investing aims at financing investments that provide environmental benefits to users and the world, here by green financing we refer to the paperless financing that can take place on digital screens and thus save paper, thereby saving a lot of tree cutting and eradicating pollution from the environment. So, one extremely important thing that financial app development is doing for the better survival of the humankind is saving paper.
So, if you are also thinking of developing a finance app for your customers, don’t wait too long and get in touch with us. We have an expert team of mobile app developers onboard who not only code but conceptualize an idea into an app product, offering most connecting user experience.
Heena Banga is a Senior Content Developer at Konstant Infosolutions- a globally recognized mobile application development company. She leads marketing and growth initiatives at the company using a mix of technical and business content tactics. Heena also contributes articles to CrowdReviews, OpenSourceForU, Sociableblog, ducttapemarketing, PAYMILL blog. She hopes to enjoy a business conversation onboard a commercial space flight someday. Her ultimate goal is to combine business and writing and go into Advertising.
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