How to Build a Mobile Banking App in 2023: Challenges and Steps

In the 21st century, smartphone apps have seen the continuous development of new technologies. These technologies have made these apps more efficient, secure, and popular. Due to features such as security, privacy, and connectivity, banks and financial institutions have also taken proactive steps to onboard the mobile app market. As a result, customers have accessed better conveniences in terms of monitoring and managing their finances. 

Now, if you are a new organization that wants to target the neo banking app segment in a competition that is already way large, how would you create a bank app that can survive obstacles that are waiting for it. 

Furthermore, in this blog, we are discussing and trying to answer the question “how to create a banking app?”. So, hopefully, you will stay until the end of this blog to have some well-researched insights that can help you throughout your banking app development process.

[To inspire your new fintech app project, here are a few best finance apps!]

Challenges that you can face during your mobile app development process

Before we proceed further, let’s start with the usual challenges that developers might face during the mobile app development process.

1. Costing

Building an efficient app that also passes quality checks might require a team of developers. These developers are paid by hours and their pay scale differs according to their regions. Also, some additional costs such as licensing fees, etc might occur as well. On average, building a moderate app might cost somewhere around $40,000+ excluding marketing and maintenance costs. So, to build a banking app, you have to prepare for this phase.

2. Security

Banking apps are targeted by cyber attackers too often. With time, as technology evolves, these attacks also evolve. So, security measures in any kind of app have to get updated regularly. To secure apps, many developers also use machine learning and AI algorithms. After all, even one security flaw can ruin the reputation of your best mobile banking app.

3. Regular updates

As mentioned above, smartphone and app technologies evolve regularly. Thus, regular updates have to get released by developers to keep their apps compatible with new operating systems and smartphones. These regular updates might require dedicated teams, recurring expenses, and other related resources. 

4. Transaction approvals

To ensure transactions done through your mobile banking app are approved, it has to clear plenty of market compliance requirements in terms of security, privacy, etc. Other financial partners or clients may automatically put a block on your finance application or transactions if any vulnerabilities are detected.

[A guide to find fintech app developers!]

Features that are required to build a banking app

Moving forward, it is crucial to understand a few basic features that most fintech apps offer. 

1. Account monitoring and alerts

This most crucial feature for any mobile banking software provides users independence from having to open separate websites to check their balances, statements, etc. To ensure your best banking app is useful for customers even in the long run, accompany these features with other perks like the ability to track spending, smart spending plans, tips, investment tips, etc.

2. Multiple factor authentication

Ensuring the enhanced security of the user and financial data is something that no mobile banking app can compromise. Multiple factor authentication protocols combine various security layers such as passwords, One-time passwords, PINs, biometric verifications, etc. 

3. Branch or ATM locator

Various fintech apps provide an in-built map to display information such as branch and ATM locations. Users can just use the app and find the nearest branch or ATM where they can get their tasks done.

4. Customer support

To provide faster customer service, apps are expected to have an in-built customer support feature. Now, the majority of banks are also using AI-supported chatbots to provide users with faster responses for queries that AI can solve on its own. Apart from that, customer support can also include a direct contact number, chatbox, or email address that can connect users with customer support specialists at any point in time.

5. Payment processing

The finance application that you are building will be more useful if users can directly make transactions through the app. Many banking apps are offering features such as unique payment addresses, QR payments, etc. Customers can use these features to send or receive money with the help of the internet.

Cost of banking app development

As mentioned above, the cost of mobile app development might vary depending on various factors. Furthermore, let’s throw some light on a few factors that might influence app development. Then we will proceed to discuss steps that will answer the question “how to make a banking app?”.

To calculate the tentative cost to build a banking app, you just need to follow these steps-

• Finalize the maximum number of hours that will involve entire app development project
• Multiply it with hourly costs of developers
• Add additional expenses such as licensing fee

The total that you get from this calculation will be your tentative cost to build the best mobile banking app. 

Steps to build a banking app

After discussing the challenges and cost of building the app, let’s go through a few steps that are required to build a fully-functional app. 

Step 1- Market research

Through market research, you will get the data reflecting the importance of mobile banking apps in your target market. You will get to know how many users use smartphone apps or how easy it is to access the internet, etc. This data will help you in allocating resources and efforts to the right type of app.

Step 2- Make a plan

Now, shortlist other details such as the difficulty level of the app, targeted operating systems, number of features, etc to make a proper plan. Every stage of the app development, including app designing, coding, testing, etc., will require separate dedicated hours, so your plans should have all things covered to save you from any unexpected financial obligations.

Step 3- Design a prototype and collect feedback

Prototype testing and feedback are important to know if your app has good potential. You can ask app developers to share their opinion, you can also share prototypes with your connections to ask them for feedback.

Step 4- Pick the technology stack

As per the suitability of the requirements of your app, pick a technology stack. It is better to pick options with your or developers’ expertise to ensure a smoother app development process.

Step 5- Start the coding process

Prepare the coding process on every element of your finance application. Also, do not forget to test your app at various stages to ensure its features are working fine.

Step 6- App testing

Now, the most important step that app development companies follow is app testing. There are tools for automated app testing as well. You can use them to speed up the process.

Post-release app development steps

After testing and releasing the app into the market, the job is not done yet. Here are some tasks or steps that will wait for you at the post-release stage of the app development.

Step 1- App maintenance

Even experts can not predict all possible errors that apps might face after joining the real world. Thus, keep an eye on the feedback shared by users to apply proper maintenance on your app if required. These updates will attract app maintenance costs as well that you need to plan beforehand.

Step 2- App updates

Keep releasing timely security and compatibility updates for your app to ensure it remains friendly with the upgrading technology.

Wrapping up

Well, these were a few steps that can answer the question “how to make a banking app?”. Hopefully, you found the blog useful. If you are planning to dive into the development of apps as well, we recommend that you read more of MobileAppDaily blogs like app development trends, UI trends, etc., to stay updated with the latest practices developers are following. We will see you with another blog soon.