The financial sector has its roots deep in centuries. The humanity has gone a long way from using pearls and stones for payments to the ability to send money across the globe within seconds.
Thus, financial field and information technology have found an effective synergism to improve the workflow and to bring lots of benefits to the customers.
Both IT and financial services don’t stand still. IT helps the financial sector enhance and evolve through modern and progressive software solutions.
In this article, we will go through the main trends concerning the partnership of information technology and finance.
Banking and finance is a vast and complex business field dealing with huge amounts of money and data, demanding high levels of security and serving almost all types of customers: from college students to global corporations.
How can financial enterprises manage all these tasks and what is the role of IT services in this field? What are the trends?
Finance and banking software solutions help gain the millennials audience. Millennials are gaining even more significance on the market nowadays both as employees and customers. They change the world in many ways that baby boomers can’t.
Mobile and digital services of various fields are a part of their lives and so are banking applications. Almost everyone has a smartphone, many people use mobile banking services hence mobile banking application development is in high demand nowadays.
Banking software solutions bring a lot of benefits to clients and improve customer experience through numerous functions and features that are now possible and available due to the advances in technology.
Finance applications allow customers to easily manage their money, track their expenses, make online and mobile payments, pay bills, open and close deposits, get loans, manage receipts by photographing them, save money – all this without going anywhere, just using a smartphone, tablet or a laptop.
Mobile and web applications development in financial services offers useful efficient solutions not only to customers but to banks and their employees as well.
Thus, online and mobile banking application development (according to the B2C model) is essential for every bank and financial company to secure positive customer experience and increase customer retention.
Likewise, ERP-, BPA- and CRM-systems are used almost in every business field today. Another application forms, that are typical for the financial sector, help boost company productivity, increase security levels and improve and automate workflow.
Now we will talk about the 5 main trends in web and mobile applications development in the finance sector.
1. Increasing cloud services usage
Cloud services enable to conduct computing processes over the Internet without downloading any software. Cloud service providers have been gaining extraordinary popularity for the last few years across many industries including banking and financial services.
Why are they so popular and useful? There are several reasons for that. They remove the necessity to own dedicated hardware or software, increase the agility, flexibility and the speed of the workflow and automate business processes, thus allowing companies to simplify them and save time, money, and human and other resources.
What’s more, they help increase system robustness in case of errors and disruptions and secure simple system recovery. This helps manage risks and solve various operational problems.
2. The need for even higher security levels
Fifty years ago, one would need guns, masks and violent techniques in order to rob a bank. Now it can be done quietly and imperceptibly, in one’s flat using just a laptop. It is not sensible to compare these two ‘methods’.
However, it must be stated that with the ever advancing information technology the cyber threat increases, hence banking and financial companies are exposed to hacking and therefore should increase their digital security levels.
Therefore, financial companies actively invest in increasing security levels in mobile banking application development through the use of proven technologies to guarantee the safety of clients’ finances and data.
Fortunately, there are many different solutions (including custom mobile and web app development for this domain) to this problem for the financial sector. For example, finance applications that can recognize fraud and cheating based on the slightest signs of potential deceit.
3. Advanced analytics solutions
Along with cloud services, analytics software solutions are used in many branches including banking and finance. The difference between advanced and traditional analytics lies in the ability of advanced analytics to make forecasts and predict results and events based on the data present.
In such a way advanced analytics also allows data mining, Big Data processing, operations optimization and simplifying the decision-making process.
The introduction of location-based services (LBS) can help obtain even more data for analysis and further usage. This results in higher work effectiveness, increased workflow speed, and even better customer experience.
4. Using digital services for customers
As mentioned above, information technology also brings lots of benefits to both individuals as customers as well as companies. We are used to having a plenty of services available on our smart devices.
Thus, we have faster access to many services that are necessary for our life, including banking. Mobile banking application development is extremely popular and useful since mobile technologies have become an essential part of our lifestyle.
Mobile banking improves customer experience, simplifies payment and transaction processes and saves your clients’ time. That’s why the majority of banks have their own mobile applications for clients.
5. Internet of Things and biometrics
However strange it may seem, the Internet of Things is changing not only the construction field, healthcare, education, but also banking and finance.
Installing sensors in bank halls can improve customer data collecting, analytics, and statistics processing.
Beacons can help you in your marketing and advertising campaigns as well as navigate your customers and employees through your buildings.
And last but not least: biometry technologies will increase security levels for authorization processes as an alternative for passwords and PIN codes that can be hacked.
Our development team at Smartum Pro brings intelligent mobile and web applications development solutions to your business, can provide you with valuable recommendations, related to finance and banking software solutions, and effective development workflow as well.