In case you plan to build your web banking app, make sure to read the article and evaluate all points before making the right decision for your business. If you have already built your own banking app – then why not to connect it to our ready Core Banking system Macrobank?
Developing a web or mobile banking app can be a lengthy and often expensive process that is supposed to pay off at the end. Building a customised app for yourself is not necessarily a bad idea, but you might waste time and money.
Before starting your own web or mobile banking app-building project, you must evaluate if the time, costs, and efforts spent on developing a customised app will be worth the investment in terms of both finance and business-wise. If you do not have an unlimited budget or an experienced IT, legal, AML team, purchasing a ready-made white-label app is the best decision you can come up.
Why we do recommend that it is always good to run a comparison before committing to any decision. Two months ago, we finished developing our white-label web banking application. This is one of the reasons why we would like to share our experience and learning with you.
1. Do not reinvent the wheel – functionality
Start with planning your functionality. Whatever your idea is, most likely, a similar software product has already been developed. Why would you do an unnecessary job and create something that already exists?
If you are in need of the standard banking app or web-bank functionality like opening current accounts, making payments – do not reinvent the wheel. You can use a ready white-label application – do not spend time and money on developing your app.
What’s more – you will need to make sure that you put the user’s needs before your own. It means that you need to give them what they need – without any extras or expensive features yielding fastest time to market. Never develop app features that your boss wants, but make sure to design the app for your end-customers. It will help you ensure that your customers have all these awesome features what they need and what they want – all of that for a fee they are ready to pay!
2. Save time and effort
Developing an app from scratch is a time-consuming process. Building a new app is not just programming. It involves many other stages. You need to find a team of professionals, conduct a discovery stage, design UI and UX, write code and test it, fix bugs, and only then, deploy your app. Usually, the process of the app development involves the following steps:
• Use cases and technical task definitions including AML/KYC and regulatory requirements
• Mapping required functionalities
• Wireframing
• Design
• Programming language/platform/technology stack selection
• Coding/programming
• Testing
All these stages require different professionals.
For this to happen, you need to be aware of the development timeframe. It is necessary to allocate between seven months up to a year to develop and deploy a web banking or mobile app. If you are unable to create two applications simultaneously, then you will have to consider around 1.5 year.
Purchasing an off the shelf solution is faster, cheaper, and more straightforward because you skip all the educational app development stages.
3 Use someone tech expertise
Do you know that the development of apps is a very complex task requiring many resources and specialists? It requires immense knowledge of IT & banking technologies, customer experience, security, AML. If you are a newbie in the market – probably you do not have all these professionals on board.
Some critical questions to ask before to start developing your own app:
Design & UX: How will you understand end-users’ expectations and make their browsing experience seamless – easy and convenient? Do you have a specialist that can help you?
KYC, AML & regulatory: How will you meet the AML rules without compromising UX? How will you make onboarding and payments fast and straightforward for the customer and fully meeting strict regulatory requirements?
Security: Do you understand the privacy and security implications? Will you know how to develop the pitch-perfect privacy policies and security features on your own or by your staff internally? Your users’ data is your most valuable asset – will you be able to put processes in place to collect, handle and store these sensitive data, as well as manage any potential security risks?
Updates: Will you have enough resources to keep up with software updates and ensure that your application is relevant and working correctly?
Integrations: Is your app ready to be integrated with a backend system? What about integrations with other service providers?
Programming: And finally, do you have experienced programmers to develop your app? Who will be the developer and analyst of a solution architecture? What kind of technology stack will be used, and how will you make the app scalable, flexible and easy customisable? And remember, you need to have excellent testers as well.
4. Know the price beforehand
Consider time and budget – Going into the mobile/web app development stage unprepared can result in costly, frustrating and brand-damaging mistakes.
For ready-made apps, you will be able to calculate all the costs in advance. Meanwhile, building your apps means that the final price may differ because of the Time and Material approach. Depending on your needs and budget, you may, of course, negotiate the pricing with the development team. Nevertheless, the ready-made app is a more secure choice.
Besides the operational approach, financing is another essential aspect you need to take into account. You need to have a clear vision of whether you can turn your dream into a real product. At this point, our recommendations would be to revise the budget. The full development budget varies between EUR 70,000 and EUR 100,000 depending on how simple or how complex and customised your app will be. Different criteria influence the final price – complexity, functionality, infrastructure and many more. Also, the price differs depending on the resources you use – internal or external. Different agencies have different charging models depending on their proficiency, size, timeframe, and other deliverables relevant to the project. The same goes for developers you want to recruit.
Besides the pricing for the development phase, you must consider ongoing support for your chosen app. It will be necessary to continuously monitor, carry out operating system updates, and optimise user experience based on customer feedback and crash logs.
5. Expect no surprises
By purchasing a ready-made app, you can look and click through and get to know the final product. If you choose to build your own app, regardless of how precise your requirements are, the final product always comes with a bit of a surprise. This is something like ordering goods from AliExpress – there will always be “Expectation vs Reality”.
For example, you are buying an off the shelf apartment vs buying an apartment with plane walls. In the first case, you do the apartment tour and get a feeling of your new home. In contrast, in the case of plane walls, you can only let your imagination run to get the picture in your head of an apartment, but you can never be sure that the final result will meet your expectations.
6. Make smart investments
When you decide to develop your app from scratch with your team, or with a development agency – you must be sure that time, money, and other resources spent on the development will pay off shortly. You must have a clear understanding of both investments and returns.
Assess your capabilities, expertise, and resources. Then, compare these investments with the investment return in terms of potential product and money. If you do not have a clear vision and strategy on how or when these investments will generate profit and customer streams, it can quickly turn into a pit of wasted resources and time.
If you still want to develop the app yourself, then answer the question – why do you want to build the app yourself? Do you want to ride the other entrepreneurs’ wave, implement extra, “nice to have” functionalities or take on a challenge that you feel you need to resolve?
Compare two ways of developing your app – buying a ready-made app with all the necessary customisations or creating a new app by yourself because it will generate a return of investments faster.
Remember, building your app from scratch can take from 8 months to 1,5 years, whereas implementing an already created app with the required customisation for your business can take 1-2 months. It means that you can generate your profit and make a return on investment faster. There is always an option C when you simultaneously develop an app and implement a ready-made one to ensure your business’s continuity.
Advapay is a technology company providing the Digital Core Banking platform to empower fintech clients or digital banks to start their businesses and accelerate digital transformation. The platform delivers all essential functionalities, a front-to-back system and a set of tools to customise and bring new integrations. With Advapay, potential and existing customers can connect either to the cloud-based SaaS or on-premise software. Besides the technical infrastructure, the company provides business advisory and fintech licensing services. Interested to learn more, please drop us a message.
