Managing an Effective Development Process for Your Fintech App

Whether you’re laser-focused on keeping your existing customers happy, acquiring new customers, or a combination of both, the user experience, performance, and security of your fintech application can give you a competitive edge.

According to Finextra, “Financial institutions have been forced to step up their game in order to keep up with consumer demand and push out several different products and services, leveraging emerging technologies, to provide customers with choice.”

Now more than ever, meeting and exceeding expectations with your online experience is crucial for success.

It’d be hard to argue that any highly adoptable tech or app doesn’t need a sound strategy backed by thorough product development. Your tech offering has to provide the ideal marriage of data security and a user-friendly experience.

Enter the importance of your development process.

An Agile Approach to Development

Moving a solution from a mere idea to a living, breathing, market-facing product requires a team of industry development experts with a disciplined approach. With agile development methodology, collaboration and accountability will help drive an innovative end product.

High-quality technology can be delivered quicker with enhanced predictability utilizing agile development. As requirements evolve over the project, this methodology helps your development partner adapt throughout the project to maximize efficiency. By applying best practices to the solution and providing visibility throughout the entire project, agile development can help ensure that the end product aligns with your business goals and customer expectations.  

The ideal development process should include:

1. Management of features and the backlog of user stories
2. Backlog grooming
3. Team capacity
4. Sprint planning
5. Sprints
6. Story points
7. Task board
8. Daily standup and retrospectives
9. Peer reviews
10. Unit testing

Commitment to Communication & Collaboration

Because communication is key to any successful project, your fintech development partner should be both consistent and collaborative in their approach to your development. Before you begin, ensure that your partner is committed to weekly or bi-weekly stakeholder meetings to ensure everyone is up-to-date and informed. With a consistent discussion forum, issues can be discussed in a timely manner and resolved more quickly to keep the project on track.

These meetings (among other things) should address:

• Project health
• Invoicing
• Budget
• Project progress
• Decision log items
• Change management

The more all parties understand the project status at any given time, the more likely the project will be completed in an efficient manner, ensuring both you and your customer’s expectations are met.

The Development Team: Training & Tools

Beyond experience on paper, your fintech partner should be putting in the hard work to continually mentor, support, and grow their development team. Through a rigorous recruiting and hiring process, thorough onboarding, on-the job training, and guidance from leadership, your partner development team should be equipped to thrive with known opportunities and a forward-thinking approach.

However, your successful project also needs a strong supporting cast:

• A standardized process: With a high-quality standard process for each project, there is consistency for the development team regardless of the project. Additionally, a standardized approach helps new developers get up to speed quickly so they can dive head-first into the project.
• A management tool: Your partner should have a primary go-to tool that they use to manage their development process. However, they should also be experienced and nimble enough to utilize any tool your business prefers.

With all stakeholders on the same page, development teams can understand the expectations, rhythm of a project, and ceremonies within the agreed-upon framework for a successful end product.

The Core10 Way™

All of the aforementioned approaches are components of The Core10 Way. It’s our development methodology that uses an agile team process to leverage each discipline appropriately for maximum efficiency across teams. Through a collaborative approach with regular communication throughout the development process, we partner with leading companies to deliver timely, excellently executed fintech projects.

To put the Core10 Way to work for your organization, contact us today.