Thanks to MC.today media for interviewing us.

Ihor Polych is the CEO of Devlight company, which has been developing mobile applications since 2016. Those apps were downloaded 35 million times in total during the last 6 years. Among Devlight’s clients are companies like Vodafone, Nova Poshta, Fishka, DOC.UA, Epicenter, Portmone, and others. Ihor Polych says that the right application can relieve physical queues in branches, optimize call centers, speed up the processing of client applications, and more. In a partner material with Devlight, he outlines what mobile apps should be in 2022 and what tasks can be solved using them.

What does a mobile app look like in 2022? What requirements does it have to meet to be beneficial both for businesses and users?

A mobile app is an optimized extension of a user for addressing a specific task. From the business perspective, a mobile app is an indispensable tool for efficient interaction and communication with a consumer. In fact, a mobile app is very often the business itself, as well as its most valuable asset.

When it comes to the benefits, the good news is that both sides strive to meet at the same point. If a company did a good job in identifying an unmet or poorly met need on the market and helped to address it with a mobile app, this is beneficial for the company.

From the end user’s perspective, if they find a mobile app that covers their needs or addresses a problem, this is the ultimate benefit for the user and the recognition for the company that created the app. Today we’ll talk a lot about value for both sides.

What are the tasks that the business can solve with the help of mobile apps?

Naturally, everything depends on a company’s business model, but the scope for the potential use of mobile apps is extremely wide. A mobile app in retail or e-commerce is an online showcase displaying all products or services, and at the same time, it is one of the most effective communication channels. If a company succeeds in having its mobile app installed on a user’s phone, this opens the opportunity to be very close to its client, both in terms of sales and in terms of communication and feedback.

If we talk about services, such as rental, taxi, handyman services, or search for a private tutor, a mobile app carries the leading business process of interaction between a user and a product. Whether the client comes back for a given service or product, depends on the quality of this business process in the mobile app.

To summarize, a business can address the following tasks with the help of mobile apps:

- Online presence of a brand in a consumer’s life

- Direct sales of services via a mobile app

- Communication with a user; building a digital loyalty program as a mobile app

- The opportunity to reduce physical queues thanks to transferring the main services online

- Optimizing call centers thanks to feedback systems in mobile apps

- Convenient and safe booking and payment for services by the user

- Creating knowledge databases and personal tools for employees

- Quick operations with data on all levels of the business

We should also remember that thanks to a rapid digitalization of our daily life, we have witnessed the emergence of companies where a mobile app is the core of business activities. For example, take a look at modern neobanks or social networks. A mobile app lies at the core of its product model, and it is the quality and stability of a mobile app that identifies whether the business is going to be successful or not.

Can you tell us about the capacities of modern mobile apps?

The mobile app industry has been around for more than 15 years, and over this time mobile app technology has made a giant leap in its development. What is a modern mobile app capable of?

- It can be your full-fledged banker and financial advisor

- It can be your personal assistant

- It can become a gym coach

- It can be your yoga or meditation coach

- It can suggest what would be an optimal meal on a Thursday night, and which wine to order from local shops

- It can help you choose your next car

In fact, the capacities of mobile apps are huge, limited only by the imagination and skills of developers. Nowadays, mobile apps perform functions that were hard to imagine some time ago.

Here are some examples: in one of the apps that we developed for a gas stations chain there is an opportunity to buy fuel online, and the price will be fixed at the moment when you made the purchase All you need to do is just drive to the gas station and refuel your car without standing in a queue.

Another interesting example is a Nature Plant app, which helps you to optimize care after your houseplants based on their photo. My favorite example that I always bring up is a Night Sky X app, which helps to interactively explore a star map and see all satellites and celestial objects around. Thanks to this product, you will open a totally different perspective of a starry sky at night.

Machine learning and the application of artificial intelligence in mobile apps have been rapidly developing over the past few years, but we’ll talk about that a little later.

What trends in mobile app development would you highlight?

The main trend in the mobile app development industry over the past three or four years has been the creation of so-called Super Apps, that is applications with a large number of various functions, allowing the user to solve a lot of tasks in one interface. ‘One app — one task’ used to be the approach of mobile app developers for many years. But currently, this approach is changing. The companies are shifting from single-task apps to universal solutions that address a lot of tasks put forward by the users.

This trend came to us from China, where such products as WeChat (the most popular app in China) combine the functions of a chat, a large bank product, and a social network. With the help of this product, a user can pay for utility services, transfer money to friends, and at the same time chat and send emojis.

This trend has been picked up by many industry leaders who started to transform their products in this direction. Backed up by a rapid deployment of 5G networks, this trend is becoming mainstream in mobile app development for the next few years.

When it comes to technological trends in mobile app development, it is worth mentioning a substantial integration of simple AI & ML solutions into mobile apps in order to improve daily user experience. Google is the main trendsetter here, as it keeps developing new AІ projects and implementing them in its mobile apps.

Some examples of such solutions:

- Route suggestions with fewer CO2 emissions, optimizing the routes that help to save fuel

- Personal walking route suggestions based on the places visited before

- Automatic removal of unwanted objects in selfie backgrounds

- Combination of photos from the whole gallery into certain categories. For example, an app may suggest a collection of photos of all the cars that you have ever taken pictures of

• Suggestions of goods and services within the budget consistent with your previous purchases.

Besides, it is worth mentioning the trends that haven’t been implemented. The biggest of those is the AR & VR technology in mobile apps. Despite the increase in power and capacities of phone cameras, we don’t see a growth of such solutions in mobile apps. The reason is simple — it is uncomfortable to use such an interface while interacting with it for a long time.

Is it true that a UX/UI design of a mobile app is one of the most crucial aspects for ensuring user-friendliness? Or is the design more about a visual attractiveness of a product?

The answer is both yes and no. The design is first and foremost aimed at convenience. An interface is a representation of business processes that are transformed into a user experience. Just think about the number of times when you deleted an app only because of a poor registration flow or an ill-conceived UX Write (communication)? I can bet there have been multiple occasions. This happens when a user has questions to the interface, and not vice versa. Design is first and foremost about preventing cases like this.

Naturally, a visual component, such as the first impression, is extremely important. It gives a powerful competitive advantage in the mobile apps world, especially in the first seconds of using the product. Every product is an individual story. The designer is ultimately responsible for finding the visual style and ensuring its relevance in order to ‘hit the bull’s eye’, as they say.

But from my personal experience I can say that a non-native UX does not stay long in users’ phones, no matter how visually attractive or trendy it is. Which brings us to the conclusion that UI/UX is synergy, synergy of inalienable components of the design process.

How do we do that at Devlight?

- Clear elaboration of the product’s business processing

- Drafting a Customer Journey Map. Here we focus on utmost optimization to ensure easy collaboration within the team

- (UX) designing both high-level and low-level interface prototypes for the product (depending on its type). Here we test various user flows, elaborate the user’s interaction with the interface of an emerging mobile app

- (UI) creating visual concepts for the mobile app. Here we develop a few alternatives of the main functionalities. The designer presents their ideas. The team has the task to carry out an objective discussion and choose the final visual style

- creating a flexible design system and finalizing the prototypes according to the approved visual concept

We repeat these steps over and over again, improving our internal processes. Sometimes success comes as a surprise, but looking back at the stages of developing the product, all the efforts we took, we say ‘Yes, we did it!’.

What does it take to make a user app successful?

In early 2022 here at Devlight we did a large-scale mobile apps market research in order to identify modern trends, new interaction patterns, and anticipate the course of the industry development in general. To summarize: About 9 million mobile apps have been created in total. Currently, 5 million apps are available for download. Of these, about 250,000 unique apps are actively developing. It is clear that the largest portion of these are someone’s entrepreneurial attempts. However, if we take an average person’s phone, there will be no more than 30 apps. A US citizen has up to 50. Up to 40% of the apps overlap. This means that nobody uses the majority of the apps.

You may ask about the reason for this. The reason is that there is a single recipe for a mobile app’s success: to fully meet a specific need of a user. When thinking over the reasons for failure of digital products we came to a very simple common conclusion in our company, namely that nobody needs most of the products. They had been created, designed, and implemented in such a way that no-one would ever want to use them. Very often they are simply copies of something successful, such as Uber or Tinder, rather than original ideas.

Any digital product (mobile app) must first and foremost be conceived and designed as something that delivers a value proposal in response to a user’s pain, need, or motivation.

The success is bound to come to a product if we follow the above formula, clearly understand our target audience, know the end user’s profile, and create a mechanism that creates a value for the user. If we ignore this approach, then we are likely to create a product that no-one needs, or offer a hackneyed value which is no longer interesting to a user.

Client-centered approach, coupled with the right technology and an ideal customer journey, is a proven combination for a successful mobile app.

Do large-scale crises have an impact of the mobile apps development industry? For example, the COVID-19 pandemics or the war in Ukraine? If they do, in what way?

They do, but contrary to expectations and logic, they have a positive impact.

Let me try to explain. The COVID-19 pandemic had forced the whole civilization into a lockdown, making a phone almost the only option for communication. As for the business, individual entrepreneurs and large teams around the world had very limited time for devising a way of providing uninterrupted value to their clients, of manufacturing products and providing services without violating quarantine requirements. In its turn, this caused an unprecedented high-speed digitalization of businesses around the globe. The only way for a business to survive was to go digital and ensure its presence in the users’ digital environment. The ‘mobile first’ became more popular than ever before. The lockdown was over, but the habits and consumer patterns stayed, so I can claim with confidence that the COVID-19 pandemics had a positive impact on the industry.

As for the war in Ukraine, the situation is different. Since the start of russia’s full-fledged invasion into Ukraine a lot of Ukrainians found themselves under occupation or simply could not leave the place where they were at the start of the war, and for them mobile apps were the only way to communicate and interact with the outer world. We clearly remember that an air raid alert app and a ‘yeVoroh’ app for tracking the movement of the russian troops appeared in the first days of the war.

On the other hand we see another unique example of a business adapting itself to the circumstances of war. The 7 months of the war have forced large retail companies, banks, and financial institutions to adopt the strategy of minimizing shopping floor space, physical departments, or service points in favor of online channels in order to ensure safety for their clients. It is safer for a business to develop online channels and delivery methods than open a physical shop in a large shopping mall that could be destroyed by a russian missile, which has already happened more than once.

At the start of the war here at Devlight we thought that we had lost our Ukrainian client for long, but now I can say with confidence that notwithstanding the harsh circumstances the Ukrainian business is taking a lot of efforts to develop its online channels, increasing investments, among other things, into mobile apps in order to stay with their clients.

How can a business adapt its digital products to operations in crisis conditions?

I don’t think there is a single formula to answer this question. Crises differ, and they have a different impact on digital products, both positive and negative. If we take the war in Ukraine as an example, the main anti-crisis efforts of business at the start of the war were to prevent physical destruction of digital products and a company’s digital infrastructure. All organizations had been working 24/7, hastily moving their digital infrastructure to cloud services, creating backups and innumerable decentralized digital copies.

The next point in the agenda was to protect the digital world of a business from massive DDoS attacks perpetuated by ruscists. This required extraordinary efforts from the teams of engineers, DevOps experts and software engineers, because on the one hand they had to repel all the attacks and strains, and on the other hand they had to continue providing services to the clients.

I think the following two points are crucial if we talk about adapting the digital products to crisis situations: enhanced digital security + moving the digital products to cloud environments disseminated around the world.

In your opinion, what makes Devlight a successful supplier in the mobile app development industry?

Client-centered approach and huge experience in building large-scale mobile projects.

In May we reached the milestone of 35 million downloads of our apps. This is a fantastic result for us, and I couldn’t have thought before that we would achieve it. In fact, every Ukrainian has interacted with the apps developed by Devlight.

On the other hand, this figure represents an incredible opportunity for data analysis and studying the analytics of user experience on the large scale. Through the prism of this analytics, we can look at many solutions that we offer from a different perspective, and this is the very factor that helps us to multiply our experience time after time. More than 10 of our clients belong to top 100 largest Ukrainian companies in 2021.

Please don’t take this as an exaggeration, but we are truly committed to our cause, and we love what we do. The company has a quite simple philosophy that a smartphone is a device that people interact with the most during the day. Therefore, we simply can’t afford to create a poor-quality user experience, select bad technological solutions, or just develop some functionality that nobody needs. The end user needs to get an efficient solution of their problems in such a way that they want to go back to the product again and again.

Sometimes we would have a client whose ideas are not fit for the market or whose solution would not find an end user, and we clearly communicate this to the client and show him the methods and the tools for validating the idea or testing the concept. If the client does not hear us, we do not continue cooperation. In fact, we refuse much more often than we get refused. A great achievement is that the whole team shares this philosophy, and we came up with the rule to make the necessary decisions, not the simple ones. This system of values truly motivates us, so we constantly raise the requirements to us and to our product.

In its turn, this helps us to win new clients with cool ideas, and then the cycle repeats itself. It is really simple.

What recommendations could you give to your clients so that they could increase their return on investment into mobile apps?

We always provide such recommendations to our clients; this is part of our service and our competitive advantage — we look at a mobile app not as an artifact, but as a product that needs to develop in order to meet the users’ needs.

The first rule that a business needs to consider to ensure a growing efficiency of a mobile app is to understand that the users’ needs in relation to digital products are constantly evolving, and the expectations are growing. We at Devlight call this a principle of ongoing client insights. This is one of the underlying principles, and if you ignore it, the product will definitely fail. If you follow this principle, then you always have the answer to the question: What level of service, technology, and functionality do the clients expect from our mobile app?

Since we live in quite uncertain times, one of the few winning strategies is to anticipate the evolution of the users’ needs. To achieve that, we need to ensure holistic understanding of the needs. Clients are a perpetual source of opportunities for increasing the value of a mobile app. They constantly interact with businesses and leave traces at every stage of interaction with a product. The task is to find these traces at every stage of the value creation chain and figure out what to do with them.

The next tip is the exceptional uniqueness of a mobile app. I personally treat this as the main principle for creating a new digital product. We have already discussed that there are more than 5 million mobile apps alone. If we consider websites, this amount grows to well over 40 million digital products. This kind of economy offers us a golden rule: diversify or die. This is why uniqueness comes to the center stage.

By focusing on the creation of a unique product a business can concentrate on a specific niche audience that is ready to pay more for the features highlighted by the company. And the takeaway for a business is quite clear: if a company wants to create and maintain a constant value of its product, it mustn’t create a non-differentiated product. This is the nature of competition in the modern world. You need to launch something so unique and special that no other business would be able to copy it fast, otherwise, you would just pour money into a business that would never bring any return on investment.

And finally, the third tip we call a principle in our team: ensure maximum user satisfaction. Following the first and the second tip does not guarantee any success. I really enjoy talking with different entrepreneurs about this third principle — why? Because it’s quite non-obvious.

The first two tips are quite logical and not that easy to miss when developing a mobile app. We imagine this the following way: let’s create a digital business based on a mobile app where a user could easily order delivery of medications to their home. Sounds easy. Users really have this need, and after a user survey, we understand that this is in fact needed, moreover, they are ready to pay for this. This is a unique idea on the market today, so an app for medicines delivery in the cities is also unique. Sounds like a match.

Say we develop an app, and what happens next? Everything happens not the way we expected. Most of the users delete the app after they’ve used it once or twice; users cannot use all the functions, which apparently are functional and obvious; and generally, everything is going wrong, while we give clients crazy discounts, offer money for registering a friend, ensure the best choice of medications in our app, etc. We seemingly have the highest efficiency, and the competition from the industry is not even close.

This is a very typical story on the market. In fact, what actually went wrong? This is a very good case to look at. But in order to understand this we need to imagine ourselves as a user who downloaded our app. So, we need to remember a rule of thumb that in the digitalization era your client is not only the client of your brand, but also of 20 more brands around.

When the client interacts with you, she consciously or subconsciously compares the experience of interaction with your brand and your product with the best practices that she has ever come across on the market. She has already had the best digital experience in other individual areas and is expecting that all those best practices will be present in your single product. So, if you fail in at least one of the areas, then you start to fail everywhere.

Let’s go back to the example of medicines delivery. When a user registers for the first time in a mobile app, she expects simple and easy registration as on Instagram. Then she is taken to the main screen of your product, where she expects comprehensive tips on using the product, as in Revolut. Next, she looks for her medicines, expecting the speed of search equivalent to Google. After finding the proper medicines, she orders delivery and expects the registration and home delivery process at least as good as in Nova Poshta app. Finally, when adding her card for payments, she expects this process to be as easy and fast as with Uber. That seems to be it.

In the majority of cases, this principle is not taken into account in product design or even in service design. Your customer works with the end user guided by their capacities and preferences while ignoring the established experience of the user. As a result, the customer gets a cool product that he/she definitely likes, that was built the way the customer expected, which is unique, but which does not perform on the market.

What do you think will be the key trends in mobile app development in the near future?

We’ve already discussed some trends in the mobile app industry earlier, and when it comes to forecasts, I would highlight two areas:

1. Rapid development of AI & ML solutions in mobile apps based on analytics of a user’s interaction with a mobile app.

Since the computational capabilities of phones have dramatically increased over the recent years, and at the same time, we see a strong development of 5G networks, all this will inevitably usher in the opportunities for more and more experiments with machine learning and application of artificial intelligence in mobile apps. One of such interesting examples developed on the US market is a Natural AI app, created by a California-based company, Brain Technologies Inc. It aims to change the way people interact with their phones, allowing the artificial intelligence to solve most of the tasks put forward by the user. In fact, this is a true digital assistant that was born as a combination of a strong AI & ML solution multiplied by the capacities of modern 5G networks.

2. Rapid development of the Flutter framework and the updating of a large number of mobile apps with the help of this framework. The main advantage of Flutter is the possibility to simultaneously develop an app both for Android and iOS using the same source code. In other words, you need one team instead of two, as with the standard approach to app development.

3. I would also add such apps as Super App. As an example, Google has now moved from common GPay to Google Wallet, which offers not only contactless payment but also the management of non-payment cards and other types of documents, such as travel tickets, flight tickets, discounts, or gift cards. We feel that in the future, this app will cover more service capacities and become a super app that will be used by millions.

Thanks to Vector media for interviewing us.

We at Vector had the pleasure talked to Ihor Polych and Liubomyr Miller, Devlight founders, about the war in Ukraine, how Devlight’s business looks now and how to work with companies that are 100 times bigger than you.

Ihor, do you recall your first reactions in the first days of the war? Were you prepared for what was about to happen?

Without a doubt, wars are terrible.

Here at Devlight, we started to prepare for the war since mid-January, when it became clear that the Russian tanks, amassed on the other side of the Ukrainian border, were not going to go back to their permanent bases. I had anticipated that a full-scale war would happen, but naturally I believed in a better course of events. That was the time when we made the decision not to initiate any investment nor development projects before March 2022 and limit ourselves only to mandatory expenses while accumulating cash.

At the company level, we developed three scenarios of how the events could unfold and carefully followed the indicators to better understand our daily reality.

The worst-case scenario envisaged a full-scale invasion that would bring about a complete collapse of our financial system and the economy in general, the closure of borders, and a massive chaos in the country.

According to the best scenario, we hoped that the international efforts of our Western partners would be efficient, and we would return to searching for diplomatic solutions of the problems that Ukraine had been faced with.

The basic scenario meant that Ukraine enters a turbulent economy and investment crisis caused by the information and hybrid war perpetuated by russia. A lot of analysts agreed that russia’s goal was to deplete Ukraine’s potential on the information and economy fronts, to scare away Western investors, and to create preconditions for a dramatic aggravation of the situation in our country. As early as at the beginning of February a number of our clients informed us that due to these circumstances, they were terminating active investments into the projects; some clients that we had been preparing large contracts with simply were turning us down, their explanation being that the war was about to start. After February 20, we were getting ready to sign two contracts for the development of mobile applications with large retailers who despite the situation were ready to initiate some projects worth a few hundreds of thousands of dollars each.

On February 24 at 05.54 am I sent a message to our team chat with the information that the war had started and provided the guidelines on what we were supposed to do next. The main priority was to evacuate our colleagues from territories that could quickly become occupied, and to ensure the overall safety for the business.

We were capable to return to work as a whole team only on March 10, after almost all our colleagues were safe, had stable Internet connection and the possibility to carry on with their work.

What does your business look like now?

Throughout the year 2021 our whole team put a lot of effort into strengthening our business after the challenges of the preceding COVID year. We completed a huge personal home assignment, which allowed us to accumulate reserves, ensure proper arrangements with our clients, and be prepared for various scenarios. Thanks to a series of well-aimed decisions that had been made before the war and during its first days we did not sack a single employee, did not sustain more losses than we estimated we would under the circumstances, and did not lose a single key client.

At the beginning of May we returned to the pre-war income levels, and currently (as we are speaking) our MRR is 2.2 times higher in comparison with January this year. I believe we’ll see the end of the year with a2.5-fold growth compared to the previous year, exceeding our pre-war projections.

Has cooperation with the clients changed? How has the geography of your clients changed?

As I mentioned before, we haven’t lost a single key client, while considerably upscaling our cooperation with some large clients. After February 24 we managed to sign a number of important agreements, essentially all-important agreements that we had been counting on. I can’t say that the process of cooperation has changed in some considerable way, no. Our clients understand the situation and the context that we are in and accommodate for this. Interestingly enough, our colleagues have greatly increased their productivity as the reaction to the war, improving the overall performance of the company.

When it comes to the geography of the clients, in our case it hasn’t changed. At the start of the war a lot of companies from our sector were massively and hastily changing their places of official registration to the EU ones, removing any mentions that their headquarters were located in Ukraine before, to make sure that they could continue attracting clients from abroad. We made a conscious decision not to follow such steps as we have always been and remain a Ukrainian company.

About problems in the Ukrainian IT sector

Has the Ukrainian IT sector slowed down this year? The answer is no. The Ukrainian IT industry continues to grow steadily. In the nine months of 2022, the volume of computer services increased by 13% despite the War and related risks and amounted to 5.5 billion US dollars.

The Ukrainian technological sector continues to hold the economic front of the country, companies timely and continuously fulfill contracts and projects, attract investments and new customers, actively enter the global market.

The reason of the above is that today the world is reacting differently to what is happening in Ukraine; a lot of companies are still ready to take the risks and choose a Ukrainian software developer, well aware of the high-quality output that they will receive. Ukrainian IT companies have demonstrated incredible resilience and overall perseverance, which allows to boost the optimistic expectations.

What is your adaptation plan? How do you plan to attract international clients?

I can’t say that we have some strong adaptation plan. Here at Devlight we constantly interact with international clients, both the existing ones and those who only consider working with us. To ensure our client’s safety we develop Continuous Business Plans for every project and constantly update them based on the situation at the front and in our business in particular. We jointly model possible scenarios to keep an eye on the possible considerable changes and their potential impact. This really helps our clients to boost their confidence.

When it comes to the plan of attracting international clients, there are no changes there — we keep achieving the planned outcomes ensured by our marketing and sales teams. As I said above, the situation in Ukraine is being assessed differently now. We see that a lot of company clients are purposely entering Ukraine now in search of engineering teams exactly in order to support our country. And this is a very positive development.

Has the company vision changed due to the war? What are the company goals now?

The answer is both yes and no.

Although we are happy with our results and with how we’re doing, looking at the market analysis over the past six month we understand that we can’t rely on the income solely from the outsourcing business. We need additional models that do not depend on the core business. In 2021 together with the partner we set the goal of developing a new business line where we would create and develop our own digital products in our areas of interest. The war has accelerated the development of these plans, and now we’re actively involved into this line; we’re looking at the opportunities and are getting ready for the first experiment.

As for the goals, we aim at developing a stable and profitable business. In late 2021 we had set an ambitious goal of a two-fold(double) growth, and we will succeed. As for the goals for the next year, I’m not ready to discuss them because there are dynamic changes taking place every week. What remains unchanged is our commitment to providing top quality services to our clients. Please do not take this as bragging, but we are good at it.

About the clients. Who are your working for now and what products are you developing?

Our clients belong to those companies that really want to receive a successful outcome of collaboration, are ready to work in our processes system, and understand the value of such partnership. There are no two identical projects in the company. We are approached by both startups that have just received investments, and large companies that strive for the excellence of their digital products and are looking for the ways to achieve a new maturity level.

In our turn, we’re interested in working with challenging products whose complexity reveals itself at the ecosystem level. Our team can truly demonstrate our approach and the Devlight’s experience accumulated over the years. For every individual client we select respective approaches and processes, guided by their goals, the technological maturity level, and the client’s team. Thanks to this the client receives the level of service they expect, and we achieve successful results of cooperation.

Currently, we are working with large banks, all-retailers, loyalty programs and crypto projects. There are several national and global industry leaders among our clients. On average, our clients have over 10,000 staff, whereas the active user base for the mobile app that we are developing is 1.2 million users who monthly interact with the product.

Why do clients choose Devlight?

I think the reason is our client-centered approach and our huge experience in developing large-scale mobile projects.

In May, we reached the milestone of 35 million downloads of our apps. This is a fantastic result for us, and I couldn’t have thought before that we would achieve it. In fact, every Ukrainian citizen has interacted with the apps developed by Devlight.

On the other hand, this figure represents an incredible opportunity for data analysis and studying the analytics of user experience on the large scale. Through the prism of this analytics, we can look at many solutions that we offer from a different perspective, and this is the very factor that helps us to multiply our experience time after time. More than 10 of our clients belong to the largest Ukrainian companies that made it to the Forbes top 100 in 2021.

Please don’t take this as an exaggeration, but we are truly committed to our cause, and we love what we do. The company has a quite simple philosophy that a smartphone is a device that people interact with the most during the day. Therefore, we simply can’t afford to create a poor-quality user experience, select bad technological solutions, or just develop some functionality that nobody needs. The end user needs to get an efficient solution of their problems in such a way that they want to go back to the product again and again.

Sometimes we would have a client whose ideas are not fit for the market or whose solution would not find an end user, and we clearly communicate this to the client and show them the methods and the tools for validating the idea or testing the concept. If the client does not hear us, we do not continue cooperation. In fact, we refuse much more often than we get refused. A great achievement is that the whole team shares this philosophy, and we came up with the rule to make the necessary decisions, not the simple ones. This system of values truly motivates us, so we constantly raise the requirements to us and to our product. In its turn, this helps us to win new clients with cool ideas, and then the cycle repeats itself. It’s really simple.

How does a small company manage to work with companies that are 100 times bigger?

I don’t think there is some secret formula here.

We really know our clients, their needs, their typical painful areas and challenges that they are faced with, as well as their expected results. This helps us to be always aligned with the client and interact with them in order to develop the best possible product. The companies that come to us clearly see our expertise level; they realize that we want to create something valuable and useful, just like them, so that’s why they select us.

The company, in its turn, continues to stick to the client-centered approach. Thanks to this we see the opportunity to create a high added value in our highly competitive market, where ensuring and sustaining a competitive advantage in the long run is extremely difficult.

How are we going to do this? We want to be so useful for our client that they always want to stay with us. And I’m talking not only about developing the app, but about the whole journey of further developing this product.

How do we achieve that?

Only with a highly professional team. And we are constantly looking for such methods to make sure that all our colleagues, both those who interact with the clients and those who develop the software, are part of this process, with sincere and ongoing commitment. This boils down to the company culture and its values.

Switching to Liubomyr Miller — Delivery Director at Devlight.

Liubomyr, is it difficult for an engineer to become part of your team?

I will start from saying that a ‘team’ is a sacred word for us, because the teams that are formed here stick together like glue and bring about a synergy effect. When it comes to quality standards, here at Devlight we are committed to ensuring the high quality of products, methods, and processes. All these things make up the ‘value book’ that each developer needs to go through and learn to share with us. As for becoming part of our team, after working in the mobile application business and interacting with a large number of clients and domain areas for a long time, we have developed a set of key requirements/skills that we expect from a potential candidate.

The first and the key requirement is the technical background of the candidate. This is the foundation upon which we’re going to build the professional stock of knowledge in our company after a successful interview.

The second skill is the speed of thinking, that is the way the person thinks and generates decisions in their mind, together with the ability to express them. This skill is extremely important for us, because the decisive factor is a timely prevention or mitigation of a problem, just like in any successful business. Based on our experience I can say that after the first meeting with the HR there is a 70% probability of predicting whether the candidate would pass the technical interview.

The third optional skill is proactivity. Depending on how proactive a person is, we fit additional roles in our projects. More proactive people usually become team leaders of mobile teams with opportunities to further develop their career and open up their potential not only as a developer but also as a person who would make final decisions in the team.

What are the quality standards and the recruitment process at Devlight?

Based on many years of working with different people, we identified a number of key standards that help us to see a potential candidate’s knowledge and skills directly during the interview.

The first standard is the experience of working with the up-to-date technical stack on the Android or iOS platform. The knowledge of the fundamentals is mandatory. Then follows a list of mandatory knowledge items according to our level. This standard is the primary one, and it helps to understand whether the person would be able to work with us.

The second standard is the knowledge of English.

The third standard is the ability to express their ideas so that a ‘model client’ could understand a problem and its suggested solution.

Overall, the interview has 5 components and takes 2 hours:

Stage 1 of the interview: these are general questions in order to set the right tone for the interview and to get to know the person better. Some sample questions for this stage are: “Where did you study?”, “How did you get into the IT?”, “Why Android/iOS?”, “Is there anything in the work you’ve done that you are proud of?”

Stage 2 of the interview is a practical live coding session. This means that our interviewer sends 2 practical tasks and asks the candidate to launch a working environment in which they will complete practical tasks. Then the candidate is asked to share their screen so that our interviewer could follow the process of completing the tasks. While performing the practical tasks we recommend our candidates to talk through the tasks and to tell us how they would address them. This helps us to see how the person thinks and how well approaches to the solutions. At this stage we can help the candidate, but only if we see that they are moving in the right direction and get stuck only on some non-critical aspects.

If the candidate fails this stage of the interview, it makes no point to move to the following stages, so we say goodbye. The interview ends with written feedback highlighting the areas for improvement.

Stage 3 of the interview is a theoretical session. After the candidate passes the practical session, we start discussing some theoretical questions. Overall, during this stage of the session we get to know what technological stack the candidate worked with and how well they know it and are able to use it. Based on this stage of the session we realize if we can give them an offer, and if yes, which project that can work on so that they could show their full potential and also start growing.

Stage 4 of the interview is an interactive game in English “I’m the client, you’re the developer”, where I as a client need to express the idea of “what improvements can be made to the app interface so that it becomes more convenient”, and we provide the respective case. This stage of the interview helps us to see two things: Number one is how well the person communicates in English, and number two is how they can behave when talking with the clients if the person needs to defend this or that technical decision and explain why it is the correct one.

Stage 5 of the interview: the questions from the candidate that we answer.

What is the company’s culture? What is it that you strive for?

Based on what was mentioned above, the things that we try to develop in the company and commit to them bring about the ‘culture of quality’. This culture was born back in the days when out company was founded, and it still encompasses all our employees. The culture of quality manifests itself first and foremost in the quality of the developers that we cater to through various challenges, interesting and non-trivial tasks, a strict approach to the tasks etc. On the other hand, the culture of quality is found in the conditions that we create for the employee. It goes without saying that a person opens up their full potential when they are placed in the right environment. Part of such environment is the team that this person will be working with, as I mentioned above, and also the team’s shared commitment to the joint goal and the values they are working on, which helps to deliver excellent practical results.

When it comes to aspirations, they are quite simple, but connected with work. All the things I described above work in synergy and boost each other. The people who join us have the opportunity to fully develop their potential thanks to the tools and practices that we provide, which is the derivative of the company’s culture that we have been developing over the years for our clients and partners.

Backing to Ihor

What have the greatest achievements and the biggest mistakes been over the past 6 years of managing the company?

Since its creation more than six years ago the company has gone through various stages of evolution. The majority of these stages, including the period of growth that we are going through now, have been very good, but there were also some periods that I wouldn’t want to live through again. But all that enriched our experience.

We founded Devlight as a true startup in a cheap office center soon after graduation, entering the market as real underdogs. We have never had an investor or any venture capital, but it never stopped us from pursuing our goals. Even during the most challenging times, like the pandemic year 2020, we remained optimistic, didn’t give up, and used our will to carry on working with whatever we had at hand. Having successfully passed a truly difficult stress test after the start of the full-fledged war, I’m optimistic about our future and I realize that we can really achieve everything that we want. I get the greatest confidence from our team, from the wonderful professionals who work every day on improving our client’s products.

Devlight’s biggest achievement is its team and the team spirit that we enjoy. Our teams are fully autonomous and prepare the agenda for developing the products themselves. Project managers closely collaborate with the client’s teams, advising them on the best practices and the necessary solutions. As for me, this is the main formula for a successful business, I mean the right people at the right places, who know how to do their job better than you. Currently I perform only intermediate control, and I keep finding proofs that the statement above is true.

As for mistakes, there are a lot of them, and sometimes it seems there are more than needed.

Looking at the retrospect, I understand that every business needs to go through development stages, and it is up to the managers’ talents to ensure that these stages are passed smoothly. The year 2020 was the most challenging for us as we hadn’t been ready for the pandemics and the unfolding events.

Going along with the trend of the preceding four years, we continued to use up a lot of funds every month for improving the work processes, providing capitals investments into the office environment and plenty of other projects. We did not estimate our capacities and miscalculated the market conditions, which causes considerable losses. Eventually we had to make substantial cuts and reassess a number of our approaches to running a business. As Steve Jobs said, “It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it.” Thanks to those mistakes, all this experience, I hope we came to a better understanding of how to move forward correctly.

Are you sorry about that?

Well, on the one hand I am, of course. But on the other hand, I understand that what has been done can’t be undone, and we just need to learn our lessons and use them for our maximum benefits.

What has changed since then?

We reexamined our company at the subatomic level and did a full rethinking. Together with team we looked deeply into every process present in the company, we invited professional consultants for almost every business area, and we did our homework. And it works! Now we have the most successful commercial year, the strongest team ever, and we have a lot of energy to move forward.

We understand the industry much better, we focus more on the long-term success factors, and not only on some short-term indicators. We grow in size, but what I’m most happy about is that we grow in our efficiency.

About entrepreneurial spirit and entrepreneurship in Ukraine.

The Ukrainian business is indeed unbreakable. Just think about it, we’ve had three huge crises over the past 8 years! Two of them involved military combat. I don’t know of any other place on the Earth where people are so devoted to what they are doing that they are ready to sacrifice their lives for that.

While the whole world was expecting that life in Ukraine was about to stop, our Ukrainian entrepreneurs continue to work, to conscientiously pay taxes, to help their employees and the army in general. Just being aware of this encourages us and gives the energy not to give up. As soon as the war is over the business will rebuild the country, and will rebuild it in such a short time that it will be included into history and business course books.

What would you like to tell our readers as a conclusion?

I think a lot has been said today already. Difficult times give birth to strong people. I think the main thing I want to wish everyone who reads this is not to give up and try to emerge from these circumstances with as few losses as possible, both for you and for those around you. If you believe in yourselves and clearly understand your goals, then you will cope, and I sincerely wish you that!

Devlight invites you to dive right into the world of fintech mobile application development to discover its latest trends, pitfalls, and tips together.

The State of Tech and Apps in the Finance Industry

Today we can notice a change in the positions of key fintech applications. Pandemic and social distancing forced the number of contactless and online payments to increase significantly, which has led to an aggravation of the issue of the cost of transactions. Of course, in the coming years, international payment systems will retain their key positions, and financial institutions will play an irreplaceable role in the legal part of this. However, business interest in alternative payment methods has increased.

At the same time, during the pandemic, the popularity of electronic wallets and cryptocurrencies has increased, and many countries are moving towards the creation of digital currencies. What is more, the variety and convenience of fintech solutions forced banks and financial organizations to reconsider their attitude toward user experience. If earlier focused on their tasks, today the needs of users are at the forefront and are the driving force of fintech application development.

Customers no longer have the patience to fill out long forms or tolerate the tedious processes of downloading printing, and scanning documents. The higher the user awareness of existing fintech apps, the higher the demand, and, accordingly, the faster the pace of development. In 2019, the EY company conducted a study according to which the level of use of fintech solutions in countries around the world is 64%, and 3 out of 4 consumers use the services of fintech payment platforms.

Today these indicators should be even higher. 2022 user is more active and interested, but also demanding, which will significantly affect the market, its participants, regulation, and the versatility of products and services. Besides, we should not forget about Generations Z and Alpha, who are growing up and whose needs influence the formation of a significant part of app development trends — banking in messengers, voice assistants when using financial products, etc.

Recent events in the world have taught us to quickly find solutions to the most unexpected events. The ability to respond to tomorrow’s needs in connection with today’s events is a necessary skill in modern fintech application development.

Types of Apps in the Fintech Market With Best Examples on the Market

Fintech application development starts with defining your niche — the type of application you want to work with. Fintech has grown in scale, influence, and several players over recent years. Thus, fintech app development attracts billions in investment every year and has logically fallen apart into several specific categories.

What do you need to know to build fintech apps? Remember that your product can either belong to one category or combine several characteristic features, forming something new and phenomenal for the market. We will now consider the types of apps you can develop with the help of the Devlight team.

Neobanking

Different applications allow access to the bank account via a completely dematerialized system and low fees. These meet important challenges in terms of reliability, simplicity, and security of information. Neobank is a mobile banking app that has no offline representations and functions solely in the virtual space.

The global mobile banking app trend remains relevant for highly digitalized countries and those only entering this exciting world. We should expect not only the appearance of new local players but also the merging of fintech companies around the world and their entering new markets.

The popularity of neobanking is explained by the convenience and quick response to the client’s request. In 2022, neobanks will continue to supplant traditional banking. Now individuals go to banks much less often than two years ago. Digital banks will actively expand their share in the fintech industry.

Examples: N26 (Germany) — neobank, Monobank (Ukraine) — neobank with hybrid budget-planning features.

Payments and Money Transfers

Apps for mobile payments process the transactions on the behalf of a company and perform the role of an intermediary between the credit card company and credit card holder. This approach enables everyone to carry out contactless payments for whatever they want wherever they want. Small businesses get the possibility to sell goods and services that customers can purchase in one click. Such fintech apps help all users receive payments for private needs and carry out transfers daily.

All reputable businesses need to implement payment processors on their platforms and apps. This not only helps to transfer money instantly but offers customers various payment options to choose from depending on the convenience, fee, and accessibility of each. Payment app development has a functional purpose but adds to the user experience and increases personalization.

Examples: PayPal (USA) — payment processor, Square (US) — payment software and app for businesses, Wise (UK) — a fintech app for international transactions.

Crypto Wallet App

The digital wallet working principle stays the same independently from the currency you are using. When it comes to crypto, you can use your wallet to send, receive, buy, or exchange cryptocurrency. Your assets are encrypted with a special key and safely stored inside the app. Of course, such a high level of data protection requires fintech software development services to enable some distinctive features. Two-factor authentication and data encryption are a must.

Storing crypto is similar to storing any other currency in mobile banking in a way that you get two keys: a public (it resembles a bank account number) and a private one (your password to access the account). Of course, you can only share the first one while the second should stay confidential.

Thus, a wallet is a middleman between a blockchain and a customer. It doesn’t necessarily store your currency — it enables you to access it and remembers the private key for you so that you don’t have to enter it manually each time.

Examples: Coinbase (US) — great for beginners, Electrum (US) — Bitcoin-specific, Exodus (US) — altcoins.

Investing/Neo Trading

Such apps represent digital platforms democratizing investments for everyone. Trading fintech app development substitutes middlemen that you would need to invest in the past by introducing tools like pro-tips, AI advisers, and Robo-brokers. You can assess risks and make favorable predictions all by yourself.

You receive obvious safe options for investing or can set your Robo-adviser to make automatic investments for you. Such apps can be super intuitive or offer pro tools for knowledgeable stock market players. Devlight, a mobile app development company, helps you introduce the functionality suitable for the audience you are targeting.

Examples: SoFi (USA) — simple all-in-one trading shop, T.D.Ameritrade (USA) — mobile stock trading app.

Insurance

Insurance financial technology (also called Insurtech) applications upgrade the insurance market by enabling policyholders to assess risks easier. Applying for process claims or coverage is a part of their purpose. You can now meet many modern apps focusing on insurtech devoted to specific roles: from car to property insurance. In general, they help you close safer deals.

Mobile app development in terms of insurtech broadens the fintech user coverage helping regular people apply for insurance for various purposes. No more long queues in the physical insurance company or paper mountains — some native apps let you receive a signed insurance certificate in a matter of 60 seconds.

Examples: Lemonade (USA) — makes everyday insurance claims easier by introducing AI and chatbots.

Loans

Mobile apps for taking apps speed up the lending procedure by connecting the borrower and the lender directly. They do the job for you and you just have to read all the conditions carefully and choose a favorable rate. What is more, they don’t focus just on massive financial institutions like credit unions or banks but often use P2P lending (peer-to-peer). It means you can take out a loan and earn on its interest.

P2P financial apps will typically ask you to provide proof of income or clear credit history. It means you are a reliable borrower and can claim an application for a fast loan. Then, lenders, who are registered in a separate version of the app, look through the applications and respond to them. Both parties can negotiate the terms directly and sign a virtual contract on favorable conditions.

This fintech market innovation is profitable for all: the lender, the borrower, and the app itself. As a borrower, you can carry out financial transactions straight inside the app: withdraw money, top up your account, or repay the loan. However, the development process is quite tedious in terms of design, legal issues, and back end since you have to come up with two versions of the platform for different parties.

Examples: Brigit (USA) — membership-based loan app.

Budgeting and Financial Planning

Thanks to fintech, you can also take advantage of applications allowing you to abandon your good old Excel file to manage your budget. Thus, financial planning apps allow you in particular to:

• categorize your expenses;
• analyze your credit reports;
• better anticipate your budget;
• make transfers;
• visualize your savings using graphical tools.

Fintech sector aggregators have forged close and secure links with the historic banks. On the one hand, aggregators attract and improve user comfort, on the other hand, traditional banks allow full and fully secure access. The partnership is an element at the heart of the success of these new applications. Thus, if you develop a fintech app for budget planning, you should emphasize user-friendliness, simple account management, and exciting features.

Examples: Mint (USA) — a free app that syncs with all your income and expense sources on all mobile devices to analyze them for you, Goodbudget (USA) — great for planning future investments and expenses.

What to Look Out for Before Developing Fintech Applications

Technology does not stand still, as shown by fintech apps development, the sphere which has begun to challenge various traditional methods related to banking. More and more banks have become interested in integrating virtual operations with their regular offerings and want to build a fintech app. Therefore, it is not surprising that this demand requires and attracts a large number of developers.

If you are a fintech mobile app developer or a business owner, here are some simple and effective tips to keep you moving in the right direction towards building a successful fintech app without any confusion.

Take Care of Legal Compliance

The first thing you need to do before you build a fintech app is to study, analyze and, most importantly, understand fintech and its legal side. You can be tech-savvy and know everything about building apps but not the banking sector. You cannot be unambiguously good at everything, financial knowledge included. However, finances and banking services are the most important components of fintech, so you should study them.

The purpose of financial apps is to help users in investment, budget planning, or insurtech matters with maximum ease for them. Once you align your trajectory with the goals of your target audience, it will be easier for you to move forward. Thus, it is a great idea to introduce a business analyst, a financial consultant, and a lawyer to your development team.

Plan a Marketing Budget

Advertising costs can reach 100–150% of the total budget for building mobile apps (depending on the scale) and are fully justified. Advertising is a profitable investment that allows you to understand whether your idea is relatable to the market or such apps already exist. How do you plan to advertise your fintech startup and make people download the application after they find out about it? Having well-developed lead flows, the customer may not be afraid to release any Android app.

As for market testing, here some people prefer to save money. In any case, testing finished banking apps on real smartphone users is an essential step before entering the market.

Plan a Development Budget

Many factors affect the cost of developing a finance app. What operating system is it being developed for — iPhones or Android? Perhaps it will be a web version? What tech stack is required to launch an investment app? What about user-friendly budgeting apps? The initial discussion stage should help you understand the needs of the project and the tools that are needed to develop a fintech that will work.

Each technology and tool embedded in an application requires market research. Will it bring maximum customer satisfaction? Is it needed for this specific project? Do you launch new fintech solutions that will take time and money to advertise? This increases the cost.

In addition, integration with third-party resources, thorough data security, and connection banking services are often required. Of course, a detailed price can be estimated only after discussing the project. Then the tasks will become clear, and the time for their implementation as well.

To carry out technical testing, it is necessary to have devices with different versions of the operating system available or use universal platforms (for example, Device AnyWhere), which allow testing the application for all models of mobile devices of interest to the customer. Therefore, when deciding on a cross-platform app or a native app, make sure you understand the budget scale.

Think Through a Clear Concept

New technologies are considered to be the backbone of fintech applications. Various technologies that include artificial intelligence and blockchain are considered to be the demand of the times and you simply have to include them in the application in some form. Blockchain can help with record keeping and AI should be used for purposes like personalized recommendations, data analysis, customer interactions, etc.

The market place you will launch your app will also define its final look. Apps for Google Play Market and AppStore have a different designs, functionality, and target audience. Of course, as a progressive app development company, Devlight will help you tackle all of these preparation stages before we move on to the next.

A Step-by-Step Guide to FinTech App Development

The process of mobile application development for the fintech industry requires integration with a large number of partners and compliance with clear regulatory norms. It may sound unrealistic, but the fact remains: Devlight is the professional helper that will take over the majority of functional procedures and liberate you from the burden of making everything yourself. Here we will share our experiences and tell how to gradually turn the dream of a fintech application into a full-fledged ready-made solution.

Step 1: Discovery Phase

At this stage, the main goal is to understand exactly what the customer needs and what competitive advantages the fintech product will have. Market research should be conducted. Business analysts are irreplaceable for this purpose.

Check our full article about Discovery Phase in Software Development

Step 2: Design Phase

Design is what users interact with. It must be not only convenient but also attractive to the client. An important task for our team at this stage is to create a recognizable style of the application and come up with digital solutions that will make the design intuitive, which is vital for fintech software development.

Step 3: Development and Testing Phase

Architecture development and partner selection are part of developing an architectural proposal for every fintech solution. It usually includes a mobile app, a fintech platform that orchestrates third-party integrations, plugins, and a back-office dashboard that serves the needs of the treasurer, customer support team, and compliance committee.

The stage of active development ends with a minimum viable product that you put to the test. All parts of such an application should be developed simultaneously and with no loss of quality because you should conduct a real-life test then. It is worth noting the important role of our specialists at this stage: architects, backend and mobile fintech developers, DevOps, QA specialists, Delivery managers, and product owners.

Step 4: The App Launch and Maintenance Phase

At this point, the activities of any project change, as a division into pre-release and post-release life appears. The app starts working with real money from customers. The product team should constantly analyze user behavior and developers should learn about new age cases or problems that needed to be fixed. If machine learning is implemented in the app, then studying the lead behavior gets easier.

Step 5: Constant Product Improvement

Further development of the project consists of the introduction of new features. For example, within 6 months after the public release, you could be still developing an investment platform, mobile payments, bonds, supporting bank accounts, international transfers, and many other fintech mobile functionalities. Taking the strategic plans of the client company into account is vital after the release because this will greatly influence the architecture of the project.

Types of Revenue Streams in Fintech App

Choosing a monetization frame is vital as you build fintech apps. You can combine several types of them or launch a pro version of your existing app a few months afterward. However, the main service options will be determined by the type of app you build and should be taken into account during the fintech mobile app development. Let’s talk about the main revenue options that you can implement for your apps in the financial services industry.

Loans

If you develop a loan fintech mobile app, it is logical that your service will serve as an intermediary between the lender and clients. Thus, you should take a fair fee for your help in speeding up such a lengthy legal procedure. All parties to the transaction can then share some part of the profit with you.

Paid Features

Enriching your app with paid features is another way to benefit from knowledgeable users who want more. Studying your target market during the app development process will enable you to find out what competitive features will make users pay (advanced Robo-advisers, AI predictions, and credit history).

Fees

Fintech mobile apps offering payment and transaction services are in full right to take a small percentage of the fee for their part of the procedure. This monetization option can be applied to currency exchange apps, trading, and investment apps.

Subscription Model

For other apps, providing a monthly or a yearly subscription can be a great solution. Budget planning apps, for instance, often offer their users premium features and cloud services that they can access for a monthly payment. It is rare for investment apps to stick to such a model, but the Robinhood app is an exception. This fee-free trading app and crypto wallet benefit from charging their users a $5-worth subscription every month.

Selling Non-personalized Behaved Data

NPB data is used for ads and referrals. This option will work if you have a large user base that creates high customer flow and activity inside the app. Clicks, visits, and any interactions can be monetized. Of course, they won’t cover all the development and maintenance costs but can be a great bonus for a company.

Challenges in FinTech Product Development Processes

Fintech applications development has its pitfalls connected with the specifics of this fast-growing and rapidly changing market. Since fintech is still a young industry, legal issues and data security remain big issues. Besides, customers quickly get used to a high level of quality services and force fintech startups to come up with more and more advanced features. What other challenges will you meet?

Challenge 1. Fit the Market — Competitive Landscape

Each task or each process requires separate tools that you need to combine in one fintech application, which will be developed specifically for the tasks of your business. Cross-platform development of a multitasking resource that will help you reach a new level is quite a high bar. However, this threshold is real for fintech.

When choosing a company to develop a fintech app, you need to pay attention to many factors so that the contractor does everything you need to do well and the final tool helps you grow and develop, not just exist on the market. After you set the initial goals high, you will also need to correspond to this level all the time. With Devlight, this task becomes easier as we work on the market analysis together.

Challenge 2. Barrier to Entry

Fintech app development is an expensive project since the stakes are high. Key market players invest millions into the design, user-friendliness, specialist recruitment process, and new data security protocols. We adhere to a reasonable price-quality ratio, we always warn customers about the cost and possible additional costs. You will find out the price for the fintech mobile app development as soon as you tell all the details about it and we agree on the structure and functionality of your fintech tool.

To start discussing your business models or clarify any details, just leave a request on the site, or contact us in any other way convenient for you. Our managers will advise you, answer all your questions and tell you what to do next.

Challenge 3. Cybersecurity and Data Protection

Given the specifics of the application, your users will be forced to trust you and provide all confidential and personal data. But if all of sudden such information is somehow leaked and falls into the hands of scammers, it is obvious that your application will come to an end. Especially when it comes to big data, encryption and protection require great attention and unusual solutions.

Since your application will interact with the main systems of the bank, you simply have to ensure security and follow all legal requirements. Therefore, you should devote enough time to developing a back-end system with firewalls and proxies.

After completion of work, you should check fintech apps’ security, up to load testing for hacker attacks with the aim of vulnerabilities in the system. This is the only way you will understand if your financial technology product is well protected or if it needs any improvements.

Challenge 4. User Retention Issues

From the push notifications design to insufficient load speed — you need to be prepared for the fact that users will speak out about your application with all sorts of suggestions or criticism. What is more, they will be completely right because they have their own opinion on this matter. Listen to them and be ready to implement all the features.

This will save you time since it will be enough to put in extra effort during the research of the application so that you can protect yourself from future redesigns. To avoid user dissatisfaction, make the application interface more comfortable for them. Make sure your development includes the right features like gradient color transitions, motion graphics, etc. And remember that users are constantly using app-based services to manage their financial data and control their debt situation, therefore, they need to trust you 100% and receive all the appropriate features from you that will make them stay.

Fintech Industry Trends in 2022

The year 2022 shed light on the shortcomings and gaps in the fintech industry that faced the market during the previous pandemic. This, in turn, actualized and accelerated the development of many trends that deepened and expanded against the background of the impending world crisis and political processes. Let’s talk about some obvious and less so ones of them.

Enabling Crypto to the Banking

As practice shows, people want to make money transfers through well-known banking and financial institutions with a history, because this creates a sense of security. After all, brands and personalities are important to people, and it is big companies that inspire trust.

People will also want to borrow money easier and faster than banks do it, without proof of income, etc. Therefore, companies in the future need to provide an alternative and determine for themselves how their centralized services are better than decentralized ones. It is where crypto will come in handy.

The Dawning of the Super-Apps

Superapps help the user not only clear the phone’s memory of digital junk, but also make the use of digital services convenient: without switching from one program to another, use all the necessary services — buy plane tickets and book a hotel, and at the same time — a transfer from the airport. Choose dishes for dinner not from one, but several restaurants, pay a single invoice and control delivery. One place to check payroll, pay for the phone and buy an insurance policy. An you as an enterpreneur can benefit from one team composition for developing all those apps.

The birthplace of super apps is Southeast Asia. It all started 10 years ago in Indonesia with Gojek, a mobile call center for motorcycle taxis and courier services. After 5 years, 4 services were combined in this application: GoRide, GoSend, GoFood, and GoShop. Their purpose is easy to determine by their names. Today, two dozen services have been united under the roof of Gojek.

The most striking example of the Asian experience of creating super apps is, of course, WeChat. It has long ceased to be just a messenger and now has dozens of financial services integrated. The Chinese prefer to watch movies, call a taxi, order food without leaving one app. This year, it also added a map that shows places where cases of COVID-19 infection have been recorded. And, most importantly, with the help of WeChat you can pay for purchases.

This functionality is especially in demand among Asian financial institutions, despite the fact that many of their residents simply do not have bank accounts. WeChat has hundreds of millions of users and, along with AliPay, has become the backbone of the mobile app ecosystem for the Asian market. As a result, many stores, service providers and other businesses are readily developing their own applets (add-ons) for WeChat in order to sell their goods directly on it.

Embeded Solutions Will Become More Popular

Companies that choose to integrate financial products into their platforms will discover the best ways to add value to their customers. Embedded finance is based on building symbiotic relationships with all stakeholders — banks, non-financial companies and fintech companies.

Brands trust fintech companies or third-party service providers for building a fintech app on the brand’s app. Fintech companies and financial service providers hope that banks will provide accurate and fast responses to API calls to their databases, and banks hope that fintechs will not abuse their secure models and will not put them at risk by providing access to their database data.

Embedded finance, blockchain technology in particular, gives companies more control over the user experience and helps them meet all user needs, whether financial or not. Another noteworthy benefit of embedded finance is the reduction in product launch times, allowing startups to launch and scale products quickly and cost-effectively.

Demand for Dealmaking in Underdeveloped Regions

Fintech finally reaches underdeveloped regions as progressive countries are making their banking sphere futuristic and more complex. African, South Asian, and Latin countries are slowly entering the market. Thus, we are sure to see a tremendous breakthrough in terms of software products development from there and should get ready to deal with many frech industry players.

AI and Machine Learning

Today fintech companies are creating trends in the field of improving customer experience thanks to the introduction of machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are the basis for determining the client’s portrait and, accordingly, improving the user experience. They allow us to offer products and services relevant to the client’s needs. ML and AI will only consolidate their positions in the automation of security processes, targeting of financial products, communication, and improvement of customer experience.

Web3 WIll Get More Mainstream

Web3 though still at the development stage is a pretty revolutionary concept. As opposed to Web2, which unites centralized data storage platforms, Web3 will enable corporations and regular users to create anonymous platforms and acheive higher privacy rate. New technologies like blockchain and artificial intelligence will be a part of this process. Of course, these changes will concern the fintech development as well.

New solutions will be delivered starting with the year 2022 allowing banks to make their apps and services more accessible. P2P transactions will reach a whole new level of privacy. However, this switch will require a stable legislative base to prevent frauds and data leaks.

Open Banking

In 2007, the European Union passed the Payment Services Directive (PSD), a bill that created a single market for payments in the EU and stimulated the emergence of safer, more innovative payment services. PSD aims to make cross-border payments within the EU as easy, efficient and secure as payments within an EU member state. This has forever revolutinized the app development in the field.

A growing number of fintech companies led to a revision of the bill, a new Payment Services Directive (PSD2) was issued, which brought with it open banking. Open Banking is a set of solutions and processes that allows banks and third-party service providers to exchange financial information and services electronically with the permission of customers.

The key thesis of PSD2 that is vital for building a fintech app : the bank is obliged to provide the payment service provider with financial information about the client and debit the money from his account without concluding a separate agreement. For the procedure, the order of the client is sufficient.

The growth of open banking will definitely stimulate synergy between representatives of the financial market and attract investment in fintech products.

Why Hire Devlight as Your Financial Software Development Service Provider?

Properly selected fintech solutions will make life easier for all parties involved and make most processes automatic. Here are some aspects of our competitive advantage for your fintech app development:

Approach

We accompany our customers from the first iteration to the winning one, we make products from scratch so that you do not have to look for additional solutions and try to establish the interaction of many teams.

Devlight managers are always ready to help you and answer all your questions. During the entire interaction process, you will be assigned a personal manager who will guide you by the hand through the entire process. Our pricing policy is simple and transparent, you always know what you are paying for and at what stage the development of your fintech app is.

Values

The main thing for us is the result. We immerse ourselves in the business of our customers and do our best to ensure that our fintech apps bring maximum benefit to our partners.

Expertise

We have been working in the field of fintech mobile app development for a long time, we know well which solutions work and which ones are not worth wasting time on, how to choose the right technologies to produce a quality tool, and how to correctly implement solutions to avoid errors, shortcomings, and revisions.

If we managed to reassure you, let us know if you are interested! Devlight will be glad to accompany you on your fintech mobile app development journey.