Selecting the Most Effective Features for your Personal Finance App Development
It seems that the quote, save money and money will save you, has become your inspiration.
There are two main aspects to any sort of personal finance, earning and saving.
Both these aspects are vital to managing an individual’s financial position.
In other words, to ensure the financial security, it is vital to keep track of your earnings and savings.
Personal finance applications are great in helping anyone manage their earning, savings, and expenses.
However, as a developer or a startup owner, you need to develop your application with the right set of features and functions.
The results of effective mobile banking app development directly translate to better customer retention and growth.
There are various prerequisites to create a successful personal finance application.
All the aspects that a finance app development must have a similar impact on the end result.
For instance, if you have an adept development team but go short on the business analysis, the app might be great looking and perform efficiently, but it will lack relevance.
On the other hand, an application with apt market analysis but an inadequate tech stack will have performance issues.
Hence, there must exist a balance between all the aspects.
How to Successfully Create a Personal Finance App?
There are two types of personal finance applications that you can create.
- Manual data entry led basic application
- Automation led advanced finance application
In both the types of applications, there are several differences in terms of;
- Features
- Cost
- Development team
- Tech stack
- And other requirements
However, for a startup, every finance app development company will recommend building a basic app first.
This is because building a basic application is cost-effective.
You will need a lesser amount of resources to build a basic version often called the Most Viable Product (MVP).
In this guide, we will list out the features for both types of applications.
To build a successful personal finance application, you need to work on;
- Idea Validation
- Discovery Workshop
- Business Analysis
- Designing
- Development
- Testing
Out of these, you already have an idea.
Must Read: Mobile App Development Process: Easy Step to Build your First App
Now for its validation, a good finance app development company will help you authenticate the idea.
Idea validation is about testing your idea against similar products in the market.
It involves analyzing the existing products and services.
Validation also involves understanding the end-users and ensuring that your product conforms to their requirements.
Building a finance application cannot be done in a vacuum.
Understanding the impact of external factors is imperative to build an app that sees success.
This is what every customer looks for in an app;
- Visualizing the Data: Budgeting is a function of understanding. The more you understand your expenses and saving, the better are your chances to become a smart money manager. Customer-friendly finance applications provide information access via charts, illustrations, graphs, and pie charts to display the data effectively.
- Secure and Compliant: Finance applications have all sorts of sensitive data. From bank information to confidential personal and professional information. Protecting this data from leaking is primary to every finance app development company. Plus, the application must also adhere to and promote the compliances required by the users to ensure a seamless experience.
- Banks Integrations: This is a feature more relevant for advanced applications. There must be provisions to link all sorts of banks within the application. This will help the users monitor, track, and analyze the information from all corners via one interface.
Discovery Workshop
The discovery workshop is the next step that every finance app development company takes.
Under this, the discovery team identifies the core set of features and other app development requirements.
However, this is not the final stage where the development team decides all the features to be integrated.
Other than features, a discovery workshop is also an essential aspect to identify;
- Team requirements
- Tech stack
- Cost estimation
Business Analysis
In this part, the motive is to identify the market position of your idea relative to the existing products.
The business analysts will thoroughly research the industry vertical to identify;
- Gaps in the existing products
- Customer sentiment towards similar products
- Marketing tactics and strategies used by the competitors
- Features of the existing products
So, by combining the results of these three aspects, a finance app development company can create a list of the top features.
Along with this, it is also essential to look at the monetization options from the app in this part of mobile banking app development.
Features of a Personal Finance Application
In this section, we will list out two types of features.
One for the MVP version and the second for the advanced version.
However, note that all the features for the MVP version must also be added to the advanced version.
MVP Personal Finance App Features List
- Sign Up/Sign In: Allow the users to sign up via their Gmail account or Facebook to enable one-click sign-up. You can also provide the option to sign in via other social media profiles.However, Facebook is the most widely used platform. Hence it works better. After Sign Up, allow the user to save their login information on the phone or the cloud. It will further enhance the user experience.
- Profile Creation and Editing: Every user must have a dedicated profile page that will contain personal, contact, and banking information. Also, give the users options to edit the information.The main profile information shall also be visible and accessible from the single dashboard.
- Aggregation of Accounts: Apart from the bank accounts integrations, allow the users to integrate credit cards, debit cards, and loan accounts in the same app. This will give maximum visibility to the users in terms of different types of accounts.
- Transaction History: Give users the option to view their transactions and spending history. Viewing the transaction history is an important aspect of money management. Better visibility into the previous spending’s gives a better scope of managing the future expenses.
- Financial Goal Setting: Goal setting is essential to make the users a smart money manager. Give them the option to set custom spending budget, savings, and other forms of expenses.
- Reminders and Alerts: In combination with goal setting, the application users should receive reminders on overdrawing or overspending. To enhance the user experience, you can add interactive responses when the users complete their monthly savings or other forms of goals.
- Payment Reminders: Due to the credit cards and loan accounts integration, the users should receive notifications for payment reminders. This will help them stay on top of the payments and never miss out on a crucial commitment.
- Search: Another great feature is to allow the users to search for a specific payment based on the date, time, or amount.
- Two Factor Authentication: Personal finance is a private and confidential aspect of a user’s life. So, to avoid anyone other than the user accessing the application, add a Two Factor authentication sequence for higher security.
- Session Mode: This implies that when the application is running unattended for a certain time, it must log out automatically. This will increase the security net and prevent any unauthorized access.
- Data Encryption: Every bit of data included in the application should be encrypted. Securing the user’s data is not only a requirement but the key to success.
These are the features that are essential to add in the MVP version of the application.
It is even more important for a finance app development company to work on these features and make a difference.
Yes, the majority of the up-and-coming personal finance applications will have these features.
But, you can make a difference in the way of presentation and designing aspects of the same.
Apart from these basic features, you should also know about the advanced features.
Advanced Features
Advanced features are required when you choose to scale the application.
While selecting the right personal finance app development company, ensure that you ask them about the same.
The reason we do not want you to include all the features at once is manifold.
But most of all, it is the cost and time you need to allocate for their development.
Including all the features at once might seem a great thing to do.
But, in case the application does not convert at the desired rate, you may end up with a big hole in your pocket.
Only after the MVP version has gained traction should you scale up the operations and add the advanced features.
- Geo-location: A smart feature that automatically picks up the location where you spent the money. It can be at Costco’s or Starbucks. All you have to do is add the money spent, where the application will automatically pick up the location.
- Automatic Information Input: Due to integration with banks, credit cards, debit card, and loan accounts, the personal finance application should automatically synchronize the accounts. This feature will remove the need for manual data entry.
- Credit Utilization: Credit utilization shows the money you owe against the credit limits on all your credit cards. By adding all the cards in the application, you will get a comprehensive credit utilization score. This allows making good spending decisions.
- Gamifying User Experience: A great way to promote user engagement is gamifications. You can set some in-app rewards, create goals sheets, and competitions to encourage users towards savings and time repayments.
- Personalization: Personalizing the application to deliver custom user experiences is an effective way to attract more customers. You can add several elements that create direct engagement with the users.For instance, while sending recommendations, a simple thing like adding the account holder’s name will create a better experience.
- Artificial Intelligence: AI helps deliver personalized insights based on the user’s spending habits and goals. By inferring large sets of data, AI algorithms convert the same to supply meaningful insights.
All these features are essential to add in your app when you scale.
Due to the time and cost required to build such features, refrain from adding them in the MVP version.
This was all about the features you need to know for creating a personal finance application.
Every finance app development company needs to take these features into account while building the app.
To Sum it Up
Building a personal finance application is easier said than done.
When you are working with an instrument that touches the user’s daily life aspects, it needs to be a smart and effective solution.
Moreover, building an application for the end-user in the 21st Century cannot be done without personalizing the user experience.
You will find two lists of features in the above sections.
One is about the features you must add in the MVP version, and the second one is for the advanced features.
While building the MVP version, add the basic features and include the advanced features while scaling the application.
To make your application successful, follow these recommendations.
- Build the app with a great design and user-centric layout.
- Make the app easy to navigate, understand, and use.
- Provide efficient customer support to all levels of users.
- For better user experience, the application must be accessible from multiple devices.
These are some core considerations that a finance app development must follow to build a successful product.
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