Development

Digital Transformation

Fintech

November 01, 2024

The Ultimate Guide to Fintech App Development and Modernization in 2025

As for 2025, the fintech app development market appears to be a good time for businesses to implement innovations to their financial solutions. According to Mordor Intelligence, the fintech industry is projected to reach $332.5 billion by 2028, demonstrating a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.3%. Such rapid development shows the extreme demand for innovative financial products, from digital banking with mobile banking apps and digital wallets to investment apps and blockchain-based apps.

Today’s the right time for businesses to invest in upgrading or developing FinTech software. 90% of consumers prefer digital financial services and online transactions. Plus, with constantly changing regulatory rules and cybersecurity issues, companies’ need for modern, secure, and scalable financial apps grows significantly.

At Artkai, we help businesses develop advanced FinTech applications for both their current demands and future objectives as well. In this post, we’re going to explore the key trends that shape the FinTech market and financial management in 2025, the most valuable reasons why you need to modernize your financial software, and the process of how to do it correctly.

Fintech market trends for 2024-2025

In January 2024, Statista showed that there were more than 13,101 fintech companies in the Americas and the Caribbean, which made these regions the true leaders of the global fintech sector. Just to compare, it is 1,500 more institutions than they had last year. The EMEA region, which includes Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, owns 10,969 fintech companies in 2024, while the Asia-Pacific has 5,886 financial institutions.

The biggest companies influencing the market today include startups like Bond, Monzo, N26, and GoCardless.

The Development of Apps for Mobile Banking

These days, mobile banking apps are essential to contemporary money management. In fact, almost 64 percent of prospective clients consider a bank's mobile features before opening an account. Additionally, 61% of consumers say they would think about switching to a different bank or fintech company if the mobile experience isn't user-friendly enough. So, developing user-friendly mobile banking apps in 2025 is the top priority for all financial organizations and banks to stay competitive.

Growth of Embedded Finance

According to Lightyear Capital, by 2025, the embedded finance market, which transforms financial services into non-financial platforms, will reach $230 billion.

BNPL (Buy Now, Pay Later) Growth

It is also predicted that by 2025, BNPL services will reach over $1 trillion in transactions worldwide. These services are important because, using them, your customers can split their payments into smaller, easy-to-manage installments. Don’t forget that this is also the reason why you need proper regulations just to make sure your customers are safe.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence

Finance apps use AI and ML technologies widely because they help automate processes like fraud detection, risk assessment, and customer support. They also enable fintech apps to deliver personalized financial advice and automate services based on real-time data, creating a smoother and more secure user experience.

Blockchain: Security and Transparency

Blockchain is reshaping fintech by making transactions more secure and transparent. Apps that use blockchain can offer safe transactions, unchangeable records, and smart contracts. It also speeds up cross-border payments and improves identity verification, making it a valuable tool for developing secure financial solutions.

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Solutions

DeFi is growing fast, offering decentralized lending, borrowing, and trading without the need for traditional banks. Built on blockchain, DeFi allows fintech apps to provide new services like peer-to-peer loans and automated trading, giving users more flexibility and control over their finances.

Better Security Features

As online threats get more advanced, security features in fintech apps are also improving. Multi-factor authentication, biometric logins, and constant monitoring are now standard. Encryption keeps sensitive information safe, which helps build user trust.

Staying Compliant with Regulations

Fintech companies need to keep up with legal changes, especially around data privacy and protecting users. Being compliant not only reduces risks but also strengthens the app’s reputation in the industry.

By focusing on these trends, fintech companies can build stronger, more secure apps that meet user demands and future needs.

Why invest in fintech app development?

As competition grows and demand is at an all-time high, many financial institutions are turning to a fintech app development company to create a fintech app for several compelling reasons.

Personalized Fintech Solutions for User Needs

Customers expect personalized experiences in every aspect of their lives, including financial services. Finance can be tricky, and if an app is too hard to use, people might get frustrated and leave. A report from the OECD shows that only about 34% of adults have basic financial knowledge. This means it’s super important to create apps that are easy to use but still offer personalization. Custom fintech apps can help businesses find the right balance by making sure everyone has a smooth experience, no matter how much they know about finance.

Cost-Effective Software Development with APIs

Years ago, developing fintech apps was costly and time-consuming, limiting such ventures to big corporations. Today, small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) can save their time and budget greatly by using third-party fintech APIs. You shouldn't build everything from scratch, but likely to integrate tools like Stripe or PayPal for payments instead, or implement Open Banking APIs to easily access customer financial data. This helps them launch apps faster.

Early Compliance and Security Integration

Working with a fintech app development company, businesses can handle legal and security requirements early on. Don't forget to follow rules like Anti-Money Laundering (AML) or data protection laws (GDPR, CCPA) because it is crucial to keeping user data safe and protecting the fintech app from risks. Also, it's important to build compliance into the app from the start to make sure it will stay secure as it grows.

Efficient Maintenance and Scalability

You may always remember that scalability isn’t just about adding more users; it’s also about keeping the app running smoothly without bugs and ensuring customer support is handled well as the app evolves. From our perspective, starting with clean code makes maintenance easier and cheaper in the long run, reducing headaches for developers and support teams as the app becomes more popular.

We recommend investing in fintech app development today because it's a good opportunity for businesses to set themselves up for long-term success by having a secure, scalable, and user-friendly product.

Top reasons to modernize your fintech app

From our experience, if businesses want to stay competitive and successful but don’t need to build a fintech app from scratch, they should invest in modernizing their products. Talking about business reasons for such modernization, here are the most notable:

Reduced Market Responsiveness

Legacy fintech products make the company less adaptive in terms of market trends, changes in regulations, and new customer demands. Since the fintech sector is very demanding and dynamic, the lack of responsiveness can lead to slower product releases, decreased market relevance, and penalties for non-compliance. That’s why fintech app modernization is a way to stay agile, win business competitions, and meet changing regulatory standards with no delays.

Improved Customer Experience

If your fintech software is outdated, it usually means it doesn’t have the intuitive interfaces and features that most modern users expect. It can make your customers frustrated and result in their switching to more innovative competitors. But by modernizing the app's UX, you can integrate new advanced features such as AI-powered personalization or seamless payment options. These features will necessarily make your customers more satisfied and boost their long-term loyalty.

Enhanced Scalability

Legacy systems are often not scalable. If a fintech company wants to expand into new markets or grow its user base, legacy platforms can be the true bottlenecks that limit performance significantly. However, in case this company makes a decision to modernize its infrastructure, it will enable smooth scalability and the ability to grow with demand and leverage new fintech industry opportunities.

Compatibility with Modern Ecosystems

Legacy fintech systems lack integration with advanced technologies and platforms such as blockchain, Open Banking APIs, or real-time payment processors. As a result, this can restrict the functionality of a fintech app and limit its future innovation potential. In contrast, modernization will make integration with modern ecosystems seamless and efficient.

Cost Efficiency

At first sight, it may seem that the cost of modernization is high enough, but in fact, if done correctly, it significantly reduces development and maintenance costs in the long run. Legacy systems require constant patching. They are usually prone to breakdowns and often need higher maintenance fees. By upgrading to modern technologies, fintech companies can get better performance while saving costs and freeing up resources for further innovation.

Aside from business reasons, there are also technical reasons why businesses need to modernize their fintech apps:

Performance Bottlenecks

Legacy tools and languages make fintech apps perform poorly and have slow load times and frequent crashes. Such products are usually very hard to maintain. However, if you modernize a financial app and implement advanced technologies, it will boost productivity, improve user engagement, and make an app compatible with financial industry standards. Thus, by modernization, you can increase the long-term growth of your fintech product.

Security Risks

Outdated fintech solutions are more vulnerable to cyberattacks because their security measures are outdated. Since financial data is especially sensitive, you should upgrade security protocols as a must. Think about implementing encryption, multi-factor authentication, and real-time threat monitoring to keep your business and customers in safe.

High Maintenance Costs

As financial systems age, they become increasingly difficult and costly to maintain. Legacy code is often very complicated and needs specialized knowledge (and specialists), and that will lead to time-consuming and expensive routine updates or bug fixes. In contrast, modern platforms are easier and more efficient to manage and require fewer resources for their maintenance.

Limited Scalability

As well as with maintenance, scaling of legacy systems is often expensive and technically challenging. Modernized fintech solutions are designed for easy scalability and lower risks of system overload or failure.

Knowledge and Information Gaps

Legacy systems often demonstrate poor documentation and knowledge gaps in case developers who maintain these products leave. For new specialists, it’s always difficult to gather all the information needed to update or improve the code. By modernizing your fintech app, you will approach documentation and knowledge sharing better, and that will lead to a smoother workflow and easier transitions between specialists.

Obviously, fintech app modernization is not just about keeping up with technology. Moreover, it’s about improving the customer experience, staying competitive, and providing your business with long-term growth and success.

Tech stack for fintech apps

Building a fintech app starts with selecting the right tech stack. It is crucial as the backbone for your app’s functionality, performance, and scalability. Basically, the choice depends on the app’s platform (web, mobile, or desktop) and whether specific components, libraries or features are used.

Based on our experience, here’s an overview of popular technologies mostly used in fintech development:

Web Apps

For web-based fintech apps, React.js and Node.js are commonly paired together.

React.js: A front-end library that supports seamless, interactive user experiences, especially useful for real-time updates—essential in financial apps where users expect data to refresh dynamically.
Node.js: On the back end, Node.js helps manage high server loads and real-time data processing, ensuring a stable, fast app experience.

Mobile Apps

For mobile banking and other financial apps, there’s a choice between native and cross-platform development.

Native Apps: Using Kotlin for Android and Swift for iOS offers great performance and access to device features. However, native development requires separate codebases for each platform, which can increase development and maintenance costs.
Cross-Platform Apps: React Native is the most popular choice for cross-platform, allowing for both iOS and Android support from a single codebase, which cuts development time and costs. Flutter could be used as an alternative, however it is usually more expensive in development than React Native.

Desktop Apps

For desktop fintech apps, Electron.js is commonly used because it allows developers to build cross-platform apps with web-based technologies like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Also, this framework is compatible with Mac, Windows, and Linux. Another option could be .NET MAUI, but it delivers the best results only for Windows-based desktop applications.

Database and Cloud Services

Popular databases that we use at Artkai include PostgreSQL, MySQL, MS SQL, MongoDB, and Redis, all of which are reliable and scalable options in fintech.
For cloud services, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure are frequently used to meet storage and infrastructure needs.

DevOps Tools

GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab or Azure Repos for code version control, collaborative software development and CI/CD.
Docker, Kubernetes and Amazon ECS for containerization and orchestration.
Jenkins for continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD).

API Security and Compliance

Don’t forget that you’re handling sensitive financial data, so implementing security standards is critical. We often include OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect for secure authentication and adhering to OWASP API Security standards to guard against common threats. We employ industry-best security practices for our infrastructure, frontend, backend, and data storage.

With a carefully chosen tech stack, fintech developers can ensure their apps are secure, scalable, and ready for the demands of modern finance.

Key steps in fintech app development

At Artkai, we recommend our clients a five-step plan for developing a functional, secure, and productive fintech app:

1. Planning and Requirement Gathering

It’s better to begin with the purpose and target audience of your financial product. First, identify your users, the specific problems they have in their financial management, and how you can solve them. Understanding your audience’s pain points is key to creating a really useful and engaging fintech solution.
Then, conduct market research and competitive analysis to explore what current fintech solutions offer and what their offerings lack. Analysis of your competitors helps you understand their strengths and weaknesses and make your product unique.
Prioritize features based on your research. Align your app’s features with the demands of your audience, your budget, your timeline, and the tech stack you can implement.
Check whether your product is compliant with financial and industry-specific regulations, such as GDPR, CCPA, and AML (Anti-Money Laundering) laws. Compliance builds trust and protects your financial business.

2. Design and Prototyping

First, give your product an information architecture (IA) that will structure your product and make it easy for users to navigate through it.
UX/UI design stage includes building an interface that is not only visually attractive but also easy to use. UX design allows users to operate through tasks smoothly and makes transactions and logging easy. UI is also highly important; that’s why think hard about layout, color schemes, and font choices.
The prototyping stage starts with the development of prototypes and testing them with real users, gathering their feedback. It helps validate how your design choices work before your team moves to full-scale development.

3. Development and Implementation

After the design is finished, the development stage begins.

Select the appropriate tech stack according to your app’s requirements. For instance, if you’re building a web app, you can leverage React.js and Node.js. For native mobile apps, Kotlin and Swift are good choices. For cross-platform development, you can use React Native. See the section above for more details on what tech stack to choose.
Next, conduct API integration with third-party financial services. They usually include payment processors, market data providers, KYC/AML services, etc.
Last but not least, don’t forget about security measures and implement strong security protocols (data encryption and multi-factor authentication) to protect your customers’ financial data. It’s also important to test security regularly to prevent, identify, and resolve vulnerability issues on time.

4. Testing and Quality Assurance (QA)

Before the app’s release, there are several steps of testing to implement just to make sure the product functions properly and meets all standards.

Functional testing to check user logins, transactions, and transfers.
Security testing to identify and fix vulnerabilities.
Usability testing to gather feedback from real users to identify potential UX issues.
Performance testing to simulate heavy usage to make sure the app is ready for traffic without lags and crashes.

5. Launch and Marketing

To promote your product, implement a consistent marketing strategy. Usually, it includes app store listing optimization and social media campaigns. Also, you may implement content marketing and influencer outreach to increase the product’s visibility.
Post-launch maintenance is also essential. It includes monitoring user feedback, customers’ activities, and the number of downloads, registrations, and interactions. Also, after you launch a fintech app, you need to continuously update the app, fix bugs and possible issues that may occur, introduce new features, and keep up with compliance. All these measures will help you keep your target engaged and your app successful in the long run.

So, the key steps of fintech app development include planning, design, development, testing, and launch stages that all help our clients build a product that meets user expectations and stands out in a highly competitive fintech market.

Fintech app modernization flow

In general, the modernization of a fintech app begins with a deep audit that includes both business and technical aspects. Conducting such an audit, you will make sure your app is aligned with industry and market needs and is competitive enough.

Business Audit
It includes an analysis of all business processes and possible bottlenecks connected with a modernized product’s launch. During it, our team usually assesses the market requirements and determines how well your product meets them because responsiveness is a game-changer for contemporary fintech products.

Technical Audit
This type of audit includes an assessment of all technical limitations that may arise and a code audit. This step also identifies bottlenecks, but from the technical side (performance issues, legacy components that affect scalability and performance negatively). Without a solid technical audit, you can’t be sure your app can handle increasing customer demands.

At Artkai, we leverage 6 modernization strategies for fintech apps:

Encapsulate - This strategy helps integrate new functionality without the current system’s disruptions. It includes encapsulating data and functions that extend existing app features and make them available through APIs.
Rehost - By redeploying the app to a new infrastructure—whether physical, virtual, or cloud—without altering its core functions or code, businesses can migrate seamlessly while maintaining the app’s integrity.
Change Platform - For those looking to adopt more advanced technology, this strategy migrates the app to a new runtime platform with minimal code changes. This ensures access to updated platforms while keeping the app’s functionality intact.
Refactor - Refactoring restructures and optimizes the app’s internal code without altering its external behavior. This helps reduce technical debt and improves non-functional aspects like performance and maintainability.
Architecture Modernization - This strategy involves materially altering the app’s codebase to adopt a new application architecture. It enables the app to exploit modern capabilities and align more effectively with evolving technologies and business operations.
Complete Rebuild - When an app requires extensive updates, a full rebuild from scratch may be the best option. This allows for designing a more robust, scalable solution while preserving the original app’s scope and specifications.

By following these strategies, we help businesses make their fintech apps ready to meet current market demands, adapt to digital transformations, and integrate cutting-edge technologies efficiently.

Case studies: Successful fintech apps and their outcomes

An Intelligent Payment Ecosystem

About the Project and Business
We partnered with DNA Payments Group, a leading omnichannel payment provider in the UK and EU, established in 2018. Our goal was to support over 65,000 merchants by enhancing their booking platform with advanced tools based on client insights.

Development Objectives and Challenges
Our main goal was to make the onboarding process easier and faster for the client. Also, we had to create a mobile-friendly version of the product. The biggest challenge was to improve the user experience on the platform across both desktop and mobile devices.

Development Process
The project took 10 months: 4 months for research and design, and 6 months for development and QA. First, we started with thorough research and deep stakeholder interviews to gather insights into the business, its users, and its pain points. Then, we conducted an audit to define usability issues and created user personas to boost engagement with the target.

Then, we created customer journeys and developed the backlog for further transformations of the client’s platform. We also redesigned the onboarding process and created an intuitive UI that included an authorization stepper and clear registration guidance. We integrated new functionality: payment monitoring, payment links, virtual terminals, and online chat support. Also, our team implemented Chart.js to make data analysis more clear and straightforward.

Outcomes
As a result of our cooperation, the client boosted their platform’s performance significantly. By the end of 2022, they became the 4th largest payment provider in the UK with the ability to process over £900 million monthly through 100,000 terminals. Plus, within the first two weeks of user engagement resulted in an 18% increase in new user sign-ups and 2.3 times reduced churn.

Building an Investment Platform for Real Estate

About the Project and Business
Our client is iFunded, a German startup aimed at innovative solutions for real estate investments. Their platform makes it easier for both private and institutional investors to invest in real estate projects, while developers get proper financing and valuable market insights.

Development Objectives and Challenges
Our challenge was to create a user-friendly platform for real estate crowdfunding in the highly regulated German market, where no similar platform existed at that time.

Development Process
The initial launch of the MVP and marketing website took 3.5 months, followed by an additional 7 months for post-launch updates and scaling. Implementing the design solution, we decided to make it clean and minimalist with the main focus on easy navigation, an intuitive process of making investments, and customized dashboards with tracking functionality for all investors. We also added an educational section with valuable resources for the German real estate market. Plus, our team developed a mobile version of the platform to boost the accessibility of the product.

Outcomes
After our cooperation, the client’s platform revolutionized real estate investments because it provides investors with a totally transparent and fee-free experience. The client received a simplified onboarding process that allowed iFunded to fund 18 projects, reaching €90 million in volume and €18 million in capital.

Financial Wellness Application for Enterprise

About the Project
Our client is Red Rocks Credit Union, the US banking and financial partner with 15,000 members and 30,000 ATMs nationwide. They needed to develop a unique B2B financial wellness app to help their employees with financial management that will reduce financial stress.

Development Objectives and Challenges
Our main goal was to build a financial wellness app that is designed to provide the client’s employees with financial advice, gather them in the community, and support their financial initiatives. The biggest challenge also included the need to boost their work performance with the help of the new app.

Development Process
The project took 7.5 months: 3.5 months for research and design stages and 4 months for front-end and back-end development. We started with industry research and audience surveys, trying to understand the pain points and the needs of the target. As a result, we designed over 400 screens for the future app. The app’s functionality was focused on boosting customer engagement; that’s why we added gamification elements to motivate users. We made them able to manage finances, set financial goals, and track progress through the app.

Outcomes
The client got positive feedback from users, which proved a demand for financial assistance among the target. The project is ongoing, so we plan to add new features and improvements further.

Wrapping up

Artkai’s approach to fintech app modernization is rooted in deep business analysis, strategic planning, and a clear understanding of market demands. By combining expertise in technical audits and business process optimization, we ensure that every fintech product we work on is not only updated to meet current standards but also future-proofed for long-term success.

If you need to build a fintech app with a robust, scalable, and user-centric design that aligns with modern market needs and fosters business expansion, contact us.