Build an App Like Chime: With 9 Simple Mobile Banking App Development Steps.

Mobile banking apps took the world by storm, and now millions of people worldwide use mobile banking for their day-to-day transactions. Mobile banking app development has become a new promise for banking and financial companies to push growth through technology. Businesses across all niches and sizes are increasingly relying on mobile banking for receiving and giving payments. The popularity of mobile banking apps is playing a crucial role in the proliferation of the digital economy.

Some mobile banking apps such as Chime have taken mobile banking app development to a whole new level thanks to their exceptional ease of carrying out instant transactions, checking balances, taking control over expenses, and accessing all banking features without paying a penny of hidden charge. Not many mobile banking apps are as successful as Chime.

Do you want to develop a mobile banking app and become as successful as Chime? Here we are going to provide a detailed guide covering every aspect of mobile banking app development, starting from the benefits, features, and critical development steps.

What is a Mobile Banking App?

A mobile banking application is a mobile app that allows banking and financial transactions and the operation of banking accounts on the mobile device screen anytime and anywhere with simple interactions.

Through mobile banking app development, a bank or fintech company offers its customers the ease of checking accounts, making all types of transactions, tracking expenses, making investments in financial products, checking insurance and claims, checking financial credibility and ratings, and making long term and short term financial planning.

The most significant advantage of mobile banking solutions is round-the-clock access to banking and financial services irrespective of location and times of the day.

Why Build a Mobile Banking App?

Mobile banking app development has become popular because most banking customers now prefer to transact through mobile instead of visiting a branch. The vast majority of Millennials already consider their smartphone to be fully capable of replacing physical wallets thanks to mobile banking software apps.

The convenience of carrying out transactions and having greater and instant control on banking activities are the two significant incentives for users to prefer mobile banking apps. These are also a big impetus to push transaction growth, creating new opportunities for banks and financial companies. Naturally, no bank or financial company can focus on the importance of mobile banking app development.

Benefits of Mobile Banking App

Mobile banking app development has already become the new ground to drive digitization for banks and financial firms. The benefits of custom mobile banking apps are too many for the customers as well as banks and financial companies. Let us have a quick look at some of these benefits.

All banking functions at your fingertip

A bank or financial company brings all the banking features to your fingertip through mobile banking app development. From allowing fund transfer and financial transactions at merchant outlets and online stores to making investments to paying bills to control and check accounts to verify credit ratings. You can do a lot more than with your physical bank visits and that too, by spending the least amount of time.

Anytime & Anywhere banking

Banks are head bent on mobile banking app development because they understand anytime-anywhere access to banking activities can easily make their customers transact more, resulting in more banking revenues. While the convenience of transactions irrespective of time and location is a huge incentive for the customers, the same is a significant aspect to push growth for the banks and financial companies.

Security & Transparency

Another crucial benefit offered by mobile banking apps is the awesome transparency that banking customers value tremendously. A mobile banking customer can now check their accounts on the mobile screen anytime and anywhere and set standard instructions or change transaction settings as per their needs. This also ensures a constant look-after for their account and helps detect frauds and unsolicited access earlier.

Personalized banking experience

Most of the leading mobile banking apps ensure catering to individual preferences and needs through custom menu options and quick access options. Through mobile banking app development, a bank or financial company can ensure customer satisfaction and convenience because of the wide range of customization options.

Fraud control

Apart from the round-the-clock visibility and constant monitoring, mobile banking app development ensures great security for the banking customers because of stronger authentication and access control mechanisms. The two-factor authorization that most mobile banking apps now utilize to prevent unsolicited access is getting stronger with the introduction of biometric authentication such as fingerprint or face recognition.

Access to cutting edge technologies

Banks and financial companies prefer to introduce mobile banking apps in their banking management and customer offerings because several cutting-edge technologies have solved the challenges of digitization. The ease of data management and robust security offered by the Blockchain database, the intuitive AI, and machine learning algorithms for detecting anomalies and irregularities make mobile banking more sophisticated.

Competitive edge

From the perspectives of the banks and financial institutions, mobile banking app development has almost become a compulsion because they are likely to lose competitive ground without a banking app. Since most leading banks and financial brands are competing for market traction through banking apps, no financial institution can stay aloof from this reality.

Must-Have Features for Mobile Banking Apps

Now that we understand how mobile banking app development continues to create value for the customers and financial institutions, we need to look at the important app features that make mobile banking possible.

Account Control

Every mobile banking app comes with easy controls and options allowing anywhere anytime account access and management. The users are able to see account balance, transaction status, statements, and control account settings.

Notifications and Updates

For every banking transaction, the app must send notifications and give the latest account balance updates. Besides verifying transactions and changes of settings, the app should send One Time Passwords (OTP) and send messages about the latest changes. For every new change and requirement from the bank, the app should send updates and notifications.

Peer to Peer Transaction

Mobile banking app development is also widely popular for facilitating easy Peer-to-peer payments for instant online cash transfer to the merchant or individual accounts. Thanks to this feature, mobile banking apps can just serve the purpose of digital or mobile wallets.

Multiple language support

Since many banking customers belong to non-English speaking communities, offering support with regional language choices is extremely important for allowing a smooth user experience of banking and financial apps. This is particularly important for banking apps to penetrate remote areas and rural regions.

Security features

For mobile banking apps offering two-factor authentication is a must to ensure optimum security. It is also essential to enforce secure session management to provide safeguards from unsolicited access.

Real-Time Tracking

Real-Time Tracking Real-time tracking of transactions and money transfers is a key feature of all banking and financial apps. The mobile banking app should deliver constant updates regarding payments and transactions, account balance, and banking information.

Checking Credit Score

Some banking and financial apps that allow their customers to check credit scores become more popular and gain more user engagement and traction. This feature helps users to check their eligibility for applying and getting loans and credit cards from banks.

Data Analytics

Robust data analytics is a crucial feature ensuring the users track their investment returns, analyze their expenses and stay updated on their progress as per financial planning. Often data analytics in mobile banking app development is offered in sync with the financial planning feature.

What is the Cost of a Mobile Banking App Development?

When it comes to the mobile app development cost, there are several variable factors such as app features, OS platform, UI design elements, chosen tech stack, development company, etc.

The eye-catching and sophisticated front-end design of a mobile banking application ensures an easy banking experience for the customers involves considerable cost. Despite the cost, a banking app project should not compromise on UI design.

There will be a standard development cost for developing the Finance apps with basic banking app features such as account creation and management, data aggregation, credit, and budget tracker. The price will increase for introducing advanced banking features such as real-time credit score tracking, EMI calculator, data analytics, etc.

The cost of mobile banking app development also depends on the chosen platform and the technology stack. Building banking apps for Android is considered more expensive compared to iOS development. Suppose you want to reach out to users across all platforms. In that case, it is advisable to develop cross-platform apps with front-end technologies such as React Native or Flutter to reduce cost while ensuring a highly native user experience.

The location of the developers and the team size is the other two factors to impact the development cost. In this regard, some countries with a great talent pool like India offer the most cost-competitive choices compared to Western European nations and the US.

Key Steps to Build Mobile Banking App

Now that we have explained the features, benefits, and cost factors for mobile banking app development, let us describe the key steps to build high-performance banking apps.

Carry out market research and plan

First, have in-depth knowledge about your competitors, the market dynamics, key development trends, and the target users for the mobile banking app. Based upon these, make a feasible plan for an app that caters to your target customers.

Create a prototype

Now shape the app idea with a design prototype that showcases the app’s structure, underlying business logic, design layout, actionable elements, and app flow in detail.

Creating app security

For financial and banking apps to introduce the best security measures is to follow time-tested and industry-acclaimed development methods such as DevSecOps, combining operations and security elements with the app development process. The project should also ensure working with a team experienced and skilled to deal with the most common security threats and vulnerabilities faced by fintech apps.

UI and UX design

According to the best practices in banking app UI/UX design, you should deliver a personalized customer experience, make the account valuable and helpful, strive for ease of use, and ensure the overall app is transparent and safe.

Choose a technology stack.

Since the choice of technology stack differs on the chosen platform and the app features and characteristics, the mobile banking app should choose a technology stack that perfectly fits the requirements. Choose tech stack to ensure faster and low-cost development while ensuring outstanding performance, stability, and user experience.

Programming the app

As for the core development of the app, a mobile banking app development project can engage an in-house development team or hire an outsourcing development company. You can opt for the first approach if your project is large, complicated, and withstand the higher budget requirements. For faster and low-cost development, you can always hire remote developers by doing more profound research into available choices.

Third-party integrations

It becomes important for a mobile banking app project to integrate APIs of third-party solutions for specific features and functionalities. For such third-party integrations, consider the performance output and security compromises that accompany such solutions.

App Release and Maintenance

For mobile banking app release, the development team should collaborate with the marketing team to fix a date that ensures optimum exposure besides giving enough opportunities for pre-launch marketing. Make sure you reach out to your banking customers way before the app is launched and set expectations beforehand to make the launch successful.

Rolling Out App Updates

In the end, a mobile banking app based upon customer feedback and finding of technical glitches should come with frequent updates to ensure constant value additions.

Conclusion

So, mobile banking app development is quite an energy and time-consuming process with many technical considerations. It needs meticulous planning of every detail corresponding to the app user experience and business logic for building a high-traction banking app. We provided some ideas of the things you should do in a banking app project.