Not sure why you should choose a fintech software development company? Here we bring together the benefits your company can get. Don’t miss it!

The financial and banking industry faces multiple critical, multifaceted challenges. The complexity of this industry needs specific custom-made solutions that are often not covered by out-of-the-box software. Having experience in software development is always important, but in the fintech industry, it is crucial as mistakes are expensive and could leave you virtually out of business. The quality of the technology is a key value.

Technology should focus on helping businesses reduce the industry’s complexity. Fintech solutions are sophisticated; therefore, the development process should enable them to minimize their vulnerabilities and be less complex. This is made possible by creating low-risk solutions that are easy to deploy. Indeed, it sounds simple, but it is not easy to accomplish. It requires a lot of expertise and an incredible, experienced team.

To achieve this, one great starting point is to choose a software factory specialized in the financial industry with the technical expertise, experience, and skillsets to work along with your company.

Considering what your company can gain from a fintech software development company, we have selected the most important perks that will take your business to the next step.

1. Flexible staff augmentation

Staff augmentation has proven to be the most effective way of facing new projects in an industry that always asks for immediate projects and changes. It helps to fill any existing skills and resource gaps within the organization at a fraction of the cost with people that work in parallel with your company. Thanks to staff augmentation, the client has the opportunity to grow at a speed and manner that would be hard to reach on their own.

With this outsourcing model, the company has direct control and can manage the team. This synergy of working all together is conducive to building better products. Nearshore software services improve the “work as one team” concept, adding cultural affinity and minimal time difference with the client.

Related content: Geographically distributed development teams, a challenge that’s worth it

2. A wide array of technological profiles

The idea of partnering with a fintech software development company means having the whole spectrum of technical profiles available that cover the needs the industry demands. Regarding developers, here are several profiles and specializations that you should focus on.

• QA and automation

Nowadays, automation of QA profiles is necessary for any financial software development project. Its benefits are countless. To name a few, we can highlight these:

• Allows the team to save time
• Improves product reliability
• Creates higher test coverage
• Can be infinitely reused vs manual testing, which is a time and cost advantage in the long term

In the financial world, testing requires a particular focus on security. The proper assessment to test applications with security in mind is essential. Therefore, the fintech software development company must have experts aware of how data breach scenarios happen in the real world and focus on activities related to cybersecurity.

The security testing team should also choose the right set of tools to do their work to detect potential vulnerabilities and patch them with attack-resistant code.

Among these tools, you can find Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) tools for performing black-box testing and detecting things like SQL and command line injection, path traversal, cross-site scripting, etc. Another one is Static Application Security Testing (SAST) tools that do white-box testing analyzing the source code and looking for vulnerabilities. The SAST tools advantage is that finding security breaches in an early stage makes them easier to fix.

This might be interesting: Best practices for secure software development projects

• Data Specialization

Apart from being the core of any financial app, the decision-making process in a fintech company should be strongly based on the data analysis. A key value of any Agile company should be skipping long and bureaucratic decision processes that take weeks or months and replace them with data-driven decision processes.

From the data analytics to the generation of data-based improvements and recommendations, there are several roles needed to mine data that can help develop better products and ideas.

There are the “big three” in data specialization roles. One, the Data Analyst works on tasks like data cleaning, business intelligence, performing analysis, and creating data visualizations. Two, the Data Scientist has responsibilities such as building models for machine learning and generating statistics to make predictions that answer crucial business questions. Finally, Data Engineers establish the foundation that other data specialization roles build upon, building and optimizing the systems to allow Data Scientists and Analysts to perform their work.

Do not miss this reading: Do you need Data Scientists for your team? You already have them!

• DevOps

As one of the stars today, the DevOps experts enable faster development of applications and easier application maintenance. They enable companies to create stronger bonds between Dev and Ops, while promoting shorter and more controllable iterations by adopting best practices, automation, and new tools.

• Specialized Business Analyst

To create outstanding products, it is essential to have a fintech Business Analyst with solid knowledge about the industry and its myriads of compliance and regulatory requirements. This is one of the reasons why the client entrusts their money to the company.

Regulations usually change and require ensuring that the software development is compliant with all the requirements that come from the government, regulatory institutions, or the chosen standards (like PCI DDS).

3. Development process focused on security

As we mentioned above, the financial industry is among those sectors with high-risk levels and challenges regarding cybersecurity. Currently, it is estimated that financial services firms are 300 times as likely as other companies to be targeted by a cyberattack, and it seems like there is an ever-growing number of cyberattacks against financial services companies. According to Accenture, the cost of cybercrime in the banking industry in 2018 was estimated at $18.3 million.

What can we do to cope with the situation? Two important practices should be in the development process:

Follow the industry standards

It is not enough, but it is necessary. There are several, but here are the most used ones:

• The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). This is mandatory for companies that deal with credit card information. It reduces fraud by protecting the customer’s credit card information (in every aspect of the code and beyond, as well as many other aspects).
• OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project). Several companies agree that this is a great reference for web security. OWASP works on articles, methodologies, documentation, tools, and technologies for improving security.

Focus on identify verification

There are some good practices in this field like two-factor authentications (2FA). First, add one-time passwords (OTP) and use adaptive (or risk-based) authentication. Second, take information like a user’s geolocation, registered devices, as well as biometric data to use in order to secure the login process. Strict session management should accompany all this while the user is logged in.

4. SOFT SKILLS

The best solutions in the financial market rely mainly on technology. Fintech management has a profound need to be well informed about the product and development process, as it is a core part of their business.

People skills can help make this communication process effective and manage conflict positively, as well as reach agreements. Critical thinking and proactive problem solving are also needed to face all the new challenges that constantly appear in this industry. Flexibility and adaptability are also crucial in an industry that is endlessly facing changes and demanding fast responses.

At Hexacta, we are convinced that the right partner is a pivotal choice and an important factor in the product’s success. What are you waiting for? Take your company to the next step!

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