A Full 2026 Guide to Software Development for Finance Businesses

Finance software has gained popularity as a tool for consumers to keep track of their spending, save money, and securely move funds while dealing with the economic instability caused by the coming recession. Consequently, software development for finance is the process of creating solutions aimed at digital transaction security, optimization and simplification, and has become quite profitable. Its necessity is undeniable for the modern entrepreneurs that tend to spend their finances wisely.

Let’s view the most common finance software types to get acknowledged with the basics and choose the most appropriate fintech app type for your business.

Lending platforms enable digital loan origination and management by automating borrower onboarding, application processing, credit assessment, and repayment workflows. Lending systems bring all stages of the lending lifecycle into one digital environment, including application processing, decision-making, risk assessment, and loan management.

For financial businesses, lending platforms reduce operational costs and speed up loan approval, improving risk management through structured data and automated checks. For users, a money lending application provides faster access to financing, transparent loan terms, flexible repayment visibility, and the ability to apply and manage loans without visiting a physical branch.

Customer finance software helps individuals manage their personal finances through budgeting, expense tracking, and financial planning tools. Customer finance applications aggregate financial data and present it in a clear, user-friendly format that supports better money-related decisions.

These applications help FinTech companies build long-term engagement by becoming a daily financial tool rather than a one-time transaction interface. Users benefit from clearer visibility into their spending and finances, which makes budgeting and financial planning easier to manage regularly.

Banking applications provide digital access to core banking services, including account management, payments, transfers, and customer support. The banking solutions act as a secure interface between users and banking systems, enabling self-service operations across mobile and web platforms.

Banking apps reduce the FinTech establishments' load on physical branches and support scalable customer service through self-service features. At the same time, customers gain continuous access to essential banking functions, allowing them to manage accounts and payments at their own pace and from any location.

Insurance software development supports digital interaction between insurers, policyholders, and claimants by centralizing policy management and customer communication. The insurance systems replace fragmented manual workflows with structured, automated processes.

Digital platforms for insurance allow insurers to replace fragmented manual processes with consistent digital workflows, which improves processing speed and data accuracy. Policyholders and applicants experience simpler interactions, quicker claims handling, and more transparent communication throughout the insurance lifecycle.

Investment applications enable users to track markets, manage portfolios, and execute investment strategies through digital platforms. They consolidate financial data, analytics, and transaction capabilities into a single interface.

Investment platforms enable financial providers to scale portfolio management and trading services without increasing operational complexity. Investors, in turn, receive a consolidated view of assets and markets, helping them monitor performance and make decisions based on accessible, up-to-date information.

The FinTech market increasingly grows. According to Adroit industry research, the total value of the worldwide market for financial technology has now surpassed $110 billion. Given its current pace of expansion, it is anticipated to be close to 700 billion dollars by 2030.

Moreover, the Statista survey mentions that more than 66% of Americans used financial services (especially digital banking) via mobile apps. That should be enough of a driving force for those motivated by business to enter that market as soon as possible.

Let’s discuss in detail the widespread benefits of financial software development:

• Cost-cutting. This is a top goal for companies in today's economic state. FinTech software may improve the organization's financial management and lead to cost savings in various operational areas. That's why it tends to be profitable for investors.
• Popularity among customers. More and more clients are using e-commerce, payment, banking, and other services online. It's a convenient way to save time and streamline daily tasks.
• Business digitization to streamline company flows. FinTech has the potential to simplify and accelerate a wide variety of corporate operations. While thinking on how to create a FinTech app, you'll face with multiple advantages like increased operational efficiency to speed up the processes and avoid human errors.
• Security of operations increased. The bespoke FinTech solutions may advise on making informed decisions in turbulent stock, cryptocurrency, commodity, and currency markets.

Let’s go further, and define the core functionality your financial app should contain to be useful and beneficial for your business.

Your customers want up-to-date mobile apps, versatile and scalable, particularly for their banking needs. They are looking for a simply consumable interface that will assist them in completing their jobs and moving on with their business tasks. So, with a well-thought-out financial technology app, you can offer customers information and services in seconds.

Based on our experience in finance software development, we have prepared a list of the must-have features your FinTech app should contain.

Modern financial software relies on multi-layered authentication mechanisms to protect user accounts and sensitive data. In practice, this includes biometrics such as Face ID or fingerprint authentication, device binding, Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), and passkeys where applicable. These mechanisms reduce the risk of unauthorized access and account takeover while maintaining a smooth user experience.

Strong access control reduces fraud exposure and supports compliance obligations on the business side, while your users gain confidence that their accounts and transactions remain protected without unnecessary friction during routine actions.

Know Your Customer (KYC) compliance is a mandatory requirement for financial systems that handle payments, accounts, lending, or investments. In real-world implementations, KYC involves identity verification, checks against sanctions and watchlists, liveness detection, and maintaining a complete audit trail of verification events.

Well-designed KYC workflows help you meet regulatory requirements across jurisdictions and reduce the risk of enforcement issues. At the same time, automated verification shortens onboarding and allows your users to access financial services faster and with less friction.

Digital payments form the foundation of most financial applications, enabling users to transfer funds and pay for services, while managing transactions securely. Payment functionality typically supports multiple payment methods and ensures secure processing across different channels and providers.

From an operational standpoint, digital payments simplify transaction processing and enable scalable revenue flows through automation. On the user side, they provide a fast and secure way to complete everyday financial activities.

Dashboards in financial software provide a consolidated view of key financial data and system activity. They commonly display account balances, transaction history, limits, alerts, and audit logs, allowing both your customers and system administrators to monitor financial operations in real time.

These dashboards support transparency and risk control by giving teams access to real-time financial data and audit information. Clear and structured reporting also helps users better understand their financial position and recent activity.

Notifications play a critical role in keeping users informed about important events within a financial application. This feature may include transaction confirmations, security alerts, unusual activity warnings, and risk-related signals that require user attention.

Timely alerts also improve incident response and fraud prevention by highlighting unusual or high-risk events as they occur. So, your users will stay informed about transactions and security-related activity without needing to constantly monitor the application themselves.

A payment gateway ensures secure communication between the application, payment networks, and financial institutions. Core capabilities for payment gateway implementation typically include tokenization to protect sensitive card data, support for recurring transactions, chargeback handling, and built-in fraud detection mechanisms.

Integrated gateway capabilities make it easier to manage payment operations, chargebacks, as well as reconciliation within a single system. Continuous monitoring and risk scoring also increase transaction reliability and reduce payment-related disputes.

Note: The exact set of features depends on your business model, regulatory scope, and product logic. Working with an experienced FinTech team helps tailor these capabilities to your requirements and avoid unnecessary complexity at later stages of development.

FinTech app development might be a challenging thing for entrepreneurs, especially startupers. We have formed a step-by-step guide to help you deal with this question.

Each business owner wants something special for their company, and nobody requires the same software that everyone else has. So, before you even begin to consider developing financial software, you need to define and think out the following:

• Future aims to accomplish with your software. Simply put, what problems you want to solve with your app. For example, you would like to start a mobile banking app development and provide users with an opportunity of secure money transfers.
• Your target audience the software will be aimed to. The audience you are targeting may be determined by a wide range of variables, including age, sex, geography, income, or education level of potential customers.
• Competitor analysis. In order to create original material that customers will find interesting and avoid making the errors that your rivals have, it might be helpful to spend the time to research what works and what doesn't for competitors.
• Monetization models you’d like to implement. You can choose Subscription, Freemium or Pay-as-you-go model to obtain profit from your app.

All this will help you explain the product’s requirements and goals more clearly to your IT partner. This way, you’ll save time and increase the efficiency of negotiations. Let’s consider where to find such a financial service technology provider.

Fintech is quite a challengeous and complex business domain. You should have enough skills and expertise to create a secure finance application with an user-friendly interface, simple to navigate.

When searching for a technical partner to create financial software, you may wonder where to start and what to look for. Here are some tips:

• Look for professional websites (e.g., Clutch, Goodfirms) include a short description of the company, portfolio, links to the company website, blog, etc.
• Compile a Request For Proposal (RFP) to companies you’ve decided to deal with will also help you find a proper tech partner and build relationships with them.
• Ask colleagues and friends. They might recommend a trustworthy financial software development partner.
• Use Google search. During it, you should pay attention to the websites of the companies you’d like to cooperate with and thoroughly learn them.

After you’ve chosen the tech vendor to cooperate with, you should submit your application containing brief info about the software you want to develop. We’ll discuss what stages your financial application will go through on the example of our software development lifecycle.

We partnered with Mangopay on a FinTech software development project, helping their team build a reliable, secure solution tailored to regulated financial workflows. Here is Mangopay’s feedback on working with Cleveroad as a FinTech software development vendor.

The Discovery stage starts with a Solution Workshop, where your initial request is reviewed after NDA signing. Business analysts, solution architects, and designers align on business goals, expected outcomes, technical assumptions, and high-level scope, clarifying key risks and constraints early on. Based on these discussions, our experts prepare a preliminary proposal with a rough estimate, delivery approach, high-level timeline, and suggested team composition.

The Cleveroad Discovery Phase services then deepens this work into a detailed product roadmap and a more accurate estimate. At this stage, requirements are refined, technical and compliance considerations are validated, and design assumptions are tested to reduce uncertainty before development begins.

During the Discovery Stage, our team typically focuses on:

• Defining the feature set and functional scope
• Selecting architecture and technology stack
• Analyzing business processes and compliance requirements
• Creating UX concepts and flow maps
• Preparing detailed timelines and cost estimates

Our UI/UX team will construct the designs after the exact requirements have been agreed upon. When doing so, they will consider factors such as fonts, colors, or styles, among other things. You make any necessary changes and then approve the version to ensure that your product maintains the desired aesthetic.

We also provide a style guide that details everything that a designer or developer could want, such as the colors, gradients, spacing rules, and font that should be used.

Cleveroad developers encode the pre-defined list of features during the stage of finance software development. Depending on the chosen platform to develop your mobile app, you may cooperate with iOS, Android, or web developers.

QA engineers are responsible for working on a project all the way up until it is released. They test the functionality that was built throughout each sprint to ensure your app’s seamless performance. After testing the backend and front end, our QA team submits concerns to software engineers.

Our team makes final edits to ensure the product is all set to release. We assist you with the finance app's launching on either the Apple App Store or the Google Play marketplace. At the time the web app is developed, we upload everything to the live server on the day of the release. When you have determined that the outcome meets your expectations, our team will hand over the materials for the project to you.

While maintenance is not strictly mandatory after launch, it plays a critical role for FinTech applications due to evolving security requirements, regulatory updates, as well as the need to ensure stable performance as user activity grows.

When the application becomes live, our collaboration does not stop. You may require technical support options and maintenance services. We update your solution with new features according to the early customers’ feedback, as well as check it for bugs for a further seamlessness.

We’ve outlined the main stages you should pass. Let’s consider the key points to think through during development.

Implemented FinTech solutions must be flawless because financial transactions may be affected by even modest math errors. So, now, we’ll talk about what aspects you must consider to succeed with your financial software.

FinTech applications handle sensitive personal and financial data, which makes security a foundational requirement rather than an optional layer. Effective protection relies on comprehensive audit logs, continuous monitoring, secure data storage, and access control based on the principle of least privilege.

In addition, FinTech systems should support basic incident response processes and comply with data protection and encryption standards without compromising usability. Our AWS-certified DevOps architects help design and maintain secure infrastructures that balance strong security controls with stable performance and a seamless user experience.

FinTech solutions must balance usability with regulatory constraints, especially in areas such as KYC flows, transaction confirmations, or access control. Effective UX design reduces friction where possible, while still guiding users through mandatory compliance steps, explaining fees, limits, and transaction rules clearly, setting appropriate user expectations, and preventing costly mistakes during money-related actions.

Through iterative UX refinement, financial products can minimize user errors in payments, transfers, data entry, and so on, while maintaining clarity across complex workflows. Our UI/UX designers focus on creating interfaces that support secure decision-making and help users complete tasks confidently without compromising compliance requirements.

Business owners must anticipate using fintech solutions for money laundering, fraud, and sanctions evasion. That's why fintech mobile apps should be compliant with regulations to prevent any unlawful use of financial data. If a startup manages in the EU, it must know how to implement DORA, a mandatory regulation for this region, and endure certifications, audits, and pen testing. Product owners must implement local policy changes quickly and update functionality for chosen users.

Our FinTech software experts will help your app be compliant with regulations essential to maintain the following:

• Security standards (e.g., KYC, PCI-DSS)
• Digital signature (QES, AES, and so on)
• Financial legislation (e.g., AMLD, PSD-2)
• Industry workflows (for example, EMV, CLOB and so on)

You may need from $90,000 to $300,000+ for financial industry software development. But that’s a pretty big range, right? The fact is that there are a wide variety of circumstances that have an impact on the final price. Some of these factors are given below for your attention.

The primary cost driver in financial software development is product complexity. It depends on the number of features, business logic depth, integrations, compliance requirements, and non-functional demands such as scalability and security. The more regulated and data-intensive the system is, the higher the effort required for design, development, testing, and validation.

A simplified way to estimate budget expectations based on product complexity is shown below:

Development cost is also influenced by the geographic location of the delivery team. Hourly rates vary significantly across regions due to differences in labor markets, cost of living, and availability of fintech expertise.

We've prepared an average hourly rate comparison by role and region in the following table:

The chosen cooperation model directly affects cost predictability, flexibility, and risk allocation. Different models suit different product stages and levels of uncertainty.

• Dedicated team is suitable for long-term or complex initiatives where continuous development and close collaboration are required. The client retains control over priorities, while the vendor provides stable, domain-experienced resources.
• Staff augmentation helps extend an internal team with specific FinTech roles such as backend engineers, QA specialists, or architects, allowing flexible scaling without full outsourcing.
• Project-based cooperation fits well-defined scopes with fixed requirements and timelines. It is often used for MVPs or clearly scoped fintech modules where functionality, compliance needs, and deliverables are agreed upfront.

We have built and scaled FinTech products for different financial use cases. Below are selected examples that demonstrate our hands-on experience in financial software development.

Our customer is an investment company that has been on the market since 1988 and has reached US$3,319.00 AUM (assets under management) by January 2021. That's why, our customer planned to expand to a micro-investment domain and needed a technical partner to build a mobile platform focused on micro-investments from scratch.

We have developed a cross-platform app for traders primarily focused on micro-investments and savings. The solution was developed as compatible with SAMA Cybersecurity Framework, and all legal and technical aspects were considered. We also offered IT consulting services, marketing analysis, and a team of specialists for technological enhancements to our client.

Our customer got the following in terms of our cooperation:

• A custom micro-investment platform compatible with fintech regulations, namely SAMA. Now, the company can work freely without risks of regulatory sanctions
• A platform that is entirely prepared to use and that takes into consideration the challenges, opportunities, and objectives of micro-investors
• Thanks to the high-quality development work and technology consulting services, successful collaboration and growth of the project have been achieved

The other company we work for is a Swiss bank that caters to customers in both the business-to-business and business-to-consumer markets by providing online investing, loan lending, and trading services. Its finance structure did not permit the expansion of the firm. The bank required the assistance of a technological partner to develop a fresh, adaptable eBanking software system that had the potential to bring in more clients.

The Cleveroad team has built and designed a bespoke eBanking ecosystem with all the features and solutions required to cover the needs of clients: sign-up process, a digital account opening system that operates in accordance with KYC guidelines, and a web platform for trading and investing. We also applied custom tools and methods in comparison with the requirements of Swiss financial regulators (namely FINMA), including a need-to-know access control system.

As a result, our customer got new eBanking software fulfilling regulations and requirements stated in the FMIA. Now, the investment bank can function freely under its existing license. The integration of the key functionality allowed our customer to increase user retention rate by 20-30%. Moreover, the company got the opportunity to free up its workers for other tasks by making use of a full-fledged ecosystem for digital account opening and other business-related activities.

Let us tell more about Cleveroad. We are a CEE-located outsourcing fintech software development vendor with more than 15 years of experience in creating digital products dealing with secure finance management and transferring. Our clients get turnkey solutions of any complexity that help them enhance the business data security, boost performance and increase profitability.

Working with us, you can benefit from the following:

• Comprehensive consultations with our FinTech specialists (PMs, Business Analysts or Solution Architects) as to your product development and implementation
• End-to-end finance software creation, after-development maintenance and support
• A team of software experts with a deep expertise in creating digital solutions for FinTech industry
• Cutting-edge tech stack and approaches to create a unique product for your financial company (e.g., Blockchain, Addepar, SAP ERP, 3CX, etc.)
• Qualified QA services to ensure the quality and flawlessness of your FinTech app, etc.

Having a practical experience in financial industry software development, we can create and deliver a modern FinTech solution for you. Let’s start our cooperation, enjoyable and productive for both sides!