FinTech App Development Cost Estimation

The Global Fintech Market is expected to reach $305 billion by the end of 2025. Throughout 2020, fintech startups scooped up 105.3 billion in funding. The largest companies contribute to that growth by attracting new investors and implementing technology-driven solutions.

Fintech is a robust sector driven by advanced technologies like API, artificial intelligence, and blockchains. The main factors that have caused the rise of fintech across the globe are:

• The implementation of Blockchain in various sectors
• FinTech reinforcing financial data security
• The growing demand for digital payments

However, the FinTech industry faces some difficulties that slow down the adoption of financial innovations and trends. Here are the main ones:

• Compliance with government regulations
• Lack of trust to financial companies
• Challenges of Blockchain and AI integration

To handle industry dynamics, fintech providers need to focus on the flexibility of their software architecture and be ready to adapt it to market and technological changes.

Fintech is quite a broad term, including different types of applications. As a financial advisor with extensive years of experience (since 2011), we’ve pointed out five main types of fintech apps and estimated them feature by feature:

• Banking app
• Lending app
• Investment app
• Insurance app
• Consumer finance

The banking app development cost consists of the client-side and admin panel costs.The customer side allows you to check your current balance and transaction history, provide transfers to other bank accounts, schedule payments, send P2P payments, and look for ATMs that are free for you to use, and more. An admin panel is established for managing users' profiles and money transactions.

The most popular examples of banking apps are:

• Monobank. Monobank mobile app offers various options: from free money transfer and credits to cashback and shakes to pay. Cashback allows users to select two categories of expenses and get 1% to 20% cashback from purchases.
• Revolut. Revolut focuses on global spendings. You can transfer money worldwide with no hidden commissions, buy cryptocurrency, gold and control your transactions with in-built analytics.
• Chime. Chime offers three separate accounts that work together: spending, saving, and secure credit. There are various options for savings like round-up transactions, saving from every purchase, and debit cards. Also, Chime has a cool SpotMe feature. It’s a service that allows you to make payments from a debit card that overruns your account limit without overdraft fees. Limit ranges from $20 to $100.

Now, let’s take a look at the approximate time and cost of creating a banking application.

Peer-to-peer lending apps connect people who’re ready to loan money with the people who need money. Such apps allow users to borrow a little cash against their next payment, and you can create one, for example, while build a DeFi app.

The top three lending apps are:

• ZestFinance. ZestFinance is an AI-based lending app. It utilizes machine learning to collect data on people with little or no credit history. Based on this information, the service defines the number of money lenders will lend to particular users.

• Dave. Dave provides users extra cash (up to $100) if they need money to cover an expense before the next payment. The service doesn’t have any interest in cash advances, but users need to pay a monthly membership commission to use the app. Besides, users receive alerts when their balance is getting low to avoid overdraft fees.
• Brigit. This service offers cash advances (from $50 up to $250), but users need to pay $9.99 per month for the Brigit Plus plan to access “instant transfers” and other valuable features. Brigit has a budgeting tool that allows users to monitor their spending and “Brigit score” model that measures the three financial metrics: bank account health, spending behavior, and earnings profile.

Insurance apps simplify working with insurance and help customers solve existing problems in the industry. There are different types of niche-specific insurance apps. It can be:

• App for claims settlement. This app is designed to manage handlers' requirements (GEICO, April Easy Claim, Pocket Agent).
• Apps for sales management. It allows workers to quickly and effortlessly get access to the sales and marketing materials (PandaDoc, RingCentral, Formstack).
• App for travel insurance. These apps provide people information regarding health and security in the destination country, weather info, and flight changes (AIG Travel Assistance app, Chubb Travel Smart, Goose).
• App for car insurance. Car insurance apps allow users to gather all necessary insurance information regarding the car accident since drivers use cameras to take a photo of the accident (Cuvva, Root, GEICO).
• Apps for insurance brokers. These apps allow brokers to manage insurance product life-cycles and provide customers with an omnichannel experience allowing for meeting their clients’ needs where they are, on any device.

All these apps have different functionality, thus the final price will depend on industry-specific features. We’ve calculated the cost based on general features that are mostly similar for different types of insurance apps.

Investment platforms allow users to review and invest in multiple financial assets. Investment management solutions help investors to increase their investment performance by providing them with relevant analytics data.

If you want to create an investment app, look at the following solutions for ideas:

• Acorns. The app is oriented for individuals that don't have spare money for investment. Acorns offers to invest step wise. The app is tracing purchases of your credit and debit card and wound up every purchase from them to a round sum. The margin is set aside in the investment portfolio. Acorns also offer financial videos and articles to help customers increase ROI. It lets users deposit and withdraw money at any time.

• Robinhood. Robinhood allows investors to invest money in Bitcoin, stock, shares, and other options at no commission trading. Users can read information about investment portfolios before buying cryptocurrencies. The app provides users with real-time market data for the selected cryptos, coins, or options and sends users notifications about the changes.
• CNBC. CNBC isn’t a direct trading app. It enables brokers with all necessary financial news, live streams, stock alerts, and interactive news to keep up-to-date with the latest updates. Moreover, users receive breaking news alerts when their stocks are at risk.

This type of app is used for managing users’ finances. It helps them to plan their spending so as not to spend more than planned.

The following solutions are good examples of fintech apps for money management:

• Mint. Mint is a top money manager, allowing users to track their income and expenses with ease. This app can be synchronized with multiple credit cards, PayPal, and bank accounts.
• MoneyLion. MoneyLion provides users with finance and loan advice. Thus, it lets them manage their finance efficiently. People can access checking accounts without fees, entirely managed investment account, cash advance, and up to 10% cashback.
• Finch. Fintech streamlines personal finance for users. The app pays the bills, sends money to friends instantly, creates groups for sharing bills, and shares links with user’s friends via the pay friends option. The service provides users with details of how often they visit the shop and how much money they spend in a month.

So, let's find out the final price of creating a fintech app by the type of the application. The estimate below are based on the $50/h rate. It’s an average software development rate in Central/Norther Europe.

How did we calculate the final price to make a fintech app by each type? We added development and non-development time. After that, we multiplied the time by the team’s hourly rate. We calculated the MVP version of each service. If you want to add more advanced features, you’ll likely pay more.

Notice: The time and price above is approximate. Feel free to contact our Senior Business Analysts to get a custom feature list and project estimate of your fintech project.

The price can also change drastically depending on your requirements. You can hire local developers to work remotely as a part of your company or assemble an in-house team. However, hiring local developers can be a complex and costly task. Also, you will bear full responsibility for the project’s result choosing in-house development.

If you want to save some budget, you can consider finding fintech app developers nearshore or offshore. This option doesn’t require additional expenses like renting the office or buying hardware, and you don’t need to be responsible for the management and product delivery.

However, fintech app development costs can differ from country to country, ranging from $350,000 in North America to $140,000 in Asia regions.

We’ve analyzed fintech app developers’ rates in different regions and estimated the cost of building fintech apps mentioned above.

You may encounter time differences and language barriers when choosing a foreign company. But experienced fintech vendors like Cleveroad optimize their software delivery process to avoid communication delays and misunderstandings. We form a communication plan with our clients to hold meetings on the convenient time for the clients.

Cleveroad is a professional software development company located in Estonia, EU. We have extensive experience in creating mobile and desktop solutions that cover different FinTech areas.

All our financial projects (like DeFi borrowing platform development, and so on) we work on are under NDA. There are only a few fintech projects in our portfolio that are allowed to be briefly told about.

We’ll give you examples of two fintech solutions in the area of microfinance and investment.

The first one is a CRM modernization for a microfinance company. Our team of 5 members was challenged to reengineer the outdated CRM system and provide high scalability of the software to meet business needs in 3 months. As a result, we completely rebuilt all СRM features using React.js and Node.js. and ensured scalability by linking the CRM with Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 cloud services.

The other one is a project for an investment company that our team of 7 members built in 16 months. We developed AMLKYC and anonymization tools using PHP, Node.js, and TypeScript. Also, our fintech software developers reworked the PDF creation tool. They optimized the counting algorithms and redesigned the system to increase performance.