Top trending technologies suited for your fintech startup

Fintech is a game-changing industry that promises to deal with the most plaguing concerns about payments. Several organizations are looking for collaboration with fintech to enhance financial processes around the globe. 

Fintech startups aim to offer innovative and disruptive digital solutions in the finance ecosystem for optimizing financial services around the globe. These tech solutions involve areas such as mobile payments, wealth management, financial management, analytics, digital wallets, lending, insurance, and digital banking. 

Today, fintech is getting a facelift due to cutting-edge technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence to enhance business growth. This break-through has made fintech a buzzword among consumers with alternative options to traditional methods. 

Facts & Figures

The stats below show how fintech’s potential and necessity is realized and will continue to disrupt the financial industry for optimizing traditional financial services. 

• According to Statista, February 2020 recorded  8,775 Fintech startups in the Americas, 7,385 in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and 4,765 in the Asia Pacific region
• A report by PRNewswire.com stated that the global fintech market is expected to reach $309.98 billion at a CAGR of 24.8% by 2022.

As fintech is reinventing money management for businesses and people, it is essential to opt for the best tech stack to develop your idea. If you’re planning to kick off your fintech startup or app and want to include state-of-art functions, fraud prevention mechanism, scalability, and capacity to handle traffic surge, you have to work with the right tech stack.

How to decide about a technology for your fintech startup?

It is difficult to choose the right tech stack for your fintech startup as it requires different technologies to outperform the traditional workflow and offer a competitive curve to others. To simplify the process, let us check out the critical factors that affect the tech stack selection.

1. Decide a niche for your startup- Every area, whether mobile banking app or digital wallet, has a specific set of requirements. Therefore, decide the market niche and verify the regulatory compliance
2. Check for regulatory compliance-Every country has rules for financial regulators. Therefore, your solutions should comply with these rules and regulations and should seamlessly handle KYC, AML, and other procedures.
3. Choose a tech stack that replicates the relevancy of users’ needs-Identify your audience’s pain points and needs and what features are relevant. Identify the technology that will satisfy these needs and can incorporate the features.
4. Keep in mind the architecture and UX/UI- Choose a tech stack that would meet your design requirements 
5. Select a development approach-The tech stack that you have selected using the above tips will help you to get a clear understanding about the development approach
6. Release MVP rather than the actual product- Always invest in MVP first. This will help you to gather the user feedback and help you to identify the strength and weakness of your fintech product.

Top trending technologies best-suited for your fintech startup

As stated earlier, all fintech apps are different and you can’t use the tech stack used in one app for the other. To identify the suitable tech stack for your fintech startup or app, you need to analyze your project, goal, the features, functionalities, and the problems it will resolve once the product is developed. 

Here is the list of the most popular programming languages, databases, and frameworks that will help you to achieve the unique requirements and needs of fintech. 

Programming languages

Let us check out the top 5 programming languages used for crafting bespoken fintech solutions by fintech development companies.

1. Java

Java has popularized as one of the most preferred programming languages for the fintech industry. The finance industry deals with enormous amounts of data every day and Java compliments this requirement securely. 

Java is extensively used by some leading banks for electronic trading platforms, retail and corporate banking portals, assets and wealth management, and customer-facing applications.

Java is a popular choice for fintech as it contributes in seamless web application development for banks and financial institutions. 

In a nutshell, Java is a trending technology that offers financial institutions with faster, scalable, and efficient fintech solutions.

2. Python

Python has been a favorite of most of the fintech companies for developing payment solutions. 

There is a worldwide popularity in adoption of digital wallets. Digital wallets require huge transactions and therefore, securing those transactions is a priority. Thus, Python is always preferred as it offers secure APIs, payment gateway integration, and scalability for digital wallet management.

One of the main reasons to use Python for quantitative finance is its capacity to process and analyze large datasets and big financial data.  Moreover, Python’s libraries such as  simplify the data visualization process and permit sophisticated statistical calculations. Also, Python supports seamless third-party integration making it a best choice for fintech as fintech products require a lot of integrations.

Python is easy to write and deploy. It boosts development speed and quickly launches products in the market. Moreover, python has the capacity for reducing error rates that makes it suitable for highly-regulated industries like finance. 

3. Ruby

Ruby on Rails is a revolutionary web development technology that helps the web developer to focus on the typical business features and logic of the fintech app. RoR helps in quicker development and launches the MVP faster. RoR increases the productivity of the developers by freeing them from tedious coding. 

RoR is used by some of the leading fintech apps and has excelled in payments, B2B lending, Equity-based crowdfunding, and insurance. 

Ruby on Rails is well-suited for fintech startups because it has a lot of built-in security mechanisms, are time and cost-efficient, delivers high performance, and boasts high speed and stability.

4. C

This programming language has been a part of fintech solutions for quite a long time. C programming technology is often preferred for Point of Sale(PoS) devices, PoS console systems, and cash register terminals. 

C language is preferable as it can be used for building web apps. It is highly portable. C compilers have the potential to optimize the code for faster execution. Another benefit of using the C language is it has numerous ready-made third-party solutions.

C language is well-suited for embedded systems, databases, billing software, advanced scientific systems, and bank management terminals.

5. C++

The fintech industry uses C++ where speed is the highest priority. C++ is known for its efficiency and code reusability. C++ is best-suited for fintech solutions that involve advanced computations, multiple operations, and quantitative finance and analytics. 

C++ is widely used in the fintech industry due to its potential to handle complex business applications as it runs efficiently and has precise control over memory usage. C++ comes with a wide array of tools. 

Though C++ is cherished and widely used, it doesn’t guarantee complete security and is a bit complex in nature. 

6. Golang

Fintech has to deal with financial data 24/7. In such cases, it is essential that the transmission of this data from fintech products to the consumers is smooth and without interruptions. Golang serves this purpose and is well-suited for accessing millions of records and handling them seamlessly. 

Go is faster and best-fit for high-load systems. It is used in server-side scripting deployment. Go enables faster development cycles as it compiles directly to the native machine code. Go is perfect for fintech solutions that are looking for high-performance and peak loads.

Another benefit of using Go is its scalability and has the capacity to access multiple requests at the same time. Some of the big fintech companies that are using Golang are PayPal, American Express, and Salesforce for Einstein Analytics.

Top fintech trends in 2021

The competition is tough. There are a lot of fintech startups budding around. Therefore, to stand out in the competition and compete with the existing players, you have to make efforts to make space and excel in the targeted niche. 

As a fintech startup your fintech solutions should have innovative methods for money transfer, payments, investments, and budgeting and financial planning. 

To make your fintech startup a success and offer bespoke solutions to your customers that would offer value to them, you need to know the top fintech trends in the B2B market for 2021.  

Here are the top fintech trends that will change the phase of fintech development in 2021.

1. Fintech as a Service(FaaS) 

An innovative practice where a fintech’s API is seamlessly integrated to another fintech’s system. This can be a mid-sized bank or credit union.  Fintech as a Service brings in greater convenience, more personalized service, optimal customer experience, and higher security.

2. Digital Payments

In this cashless transaction era, the payment industry has witnessed a technological shift from mission-critical services to containerized architectures on the cloud for high scalability,  cost-effective, and zero downtime. 

3. Artificial Intelligence

Financial institutions are fine-tuning their AI solution strategies to reduce banking operating cost by 22% till 2030. In addition to chatbots and other customer service systems, AI is poised to combat cybercrime and financial threats in this year. 

4. Blockchain

Embrace this disruptive technology to revolutionize fintech through faster, cheaper, and efficient blockchain solutions and offer greater transparency and improved traceability

5. Cryptocurrency

An investment that is worth in 2021, cryptocurrency offers lower transaction fees for online exchange of funds, enhanced security, and fast and instant payments that will contribute towards the global economy  

6. Serverless

Dramatically reduces structural and operational costs and allows to pay only for the services that are required, making serverless an ideal choice for application development for your business

7. Security

Migration to cloud welcomes numerous opportunities in terms of security.Disruptive technologies such as Machine Learning is used for securing fintech apps on the cloud with various automated threat detection systems that too in an extremely affordable price

Trending fintech products and the technologies used 

Here is a list of some leading fintech products with their tech stacks.

1. Coinbase- A digital asset trading and investment platform that includes a flat-to-crypto exchange. 

Technologies used:

• Cloud services: AWS.
• Databases and stores: IronMQ.
• DevOps solutions: Bugsnag, GeoEngineer, New Relic, CircleCI. 
• Frameworks: Ruby on Rails.
• Programming languages: Ruby.
• Extras: Authy, BlockScore, CloudFlare, Mixpanel, nginx, HackerOne.

2. Chime- Offers neo-banking services

Technologies used:

• Cloud services: AWS.
• Databases and stores: Citus, Kafka, Snowflake.
• DevOps solutions: GitHub, Kubernetes, Visual Studio, CircleCI.
• Frameworks: React Native, Ruby on Rails,
• Programming languages: Elixir, JavaScript, Ruby, 
• Extras: Looker, Optimizely, Plaid, Segment.

3. N26- A powerful mobile app that offers neobank facilities at pretty low prices.

Technologies used:

• Cloud services: AWS.
• Databases and stores: Redis, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Realm.
• DevOps solutions: GitHub, Docker, Visual Studio, Selenium, Gradle.
• Frameworks: Node.js, Vapor.
• Programming languages: Python, Java, Kotlin, TypeScript, Swift, Julia.
• Extras: Ubuntu, nginx, Debian, Postman.

4. Revolut- Offers digital-only financial services such as payments, transfers, and investment opportunities

Technologies used:

• Cloud services: Google Cloud.
• Databases and stores: PostgreSQL.
• DevOps solutions: Docker, Git, Visual Studio, Bitbucket.
• Frameworks: Gatsby, Node.js
• Programming languages: Java, JavaScript, Kotlin, Python, Scala, Swift, TypeScript. 
• Extras: nginx.

5. Robinhood-Offers next-gen investment solutions via mobile apps and desktop apps. 

Technologies used:

• Cloud services: AWS.
• Databases and stores: PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, RabbitMQ. 
• DevOps solutions: Git, Docker, Jenkins, Kubernetes, Webpack, Babel.
• Frameworks: Bootstrap, Django.
• Programming languages: Python, Go, Swift, Kotlin. 
• Extras: nginx, Ubuntu, RxJava.

In a nutshell

As a fintech startup, choosing a technology is crucial. Plan out what your startup aims for. Whether you are focusing on neobank, or want to develop a digital-only banking app or a payment app. 

Your technology stack should meet all the fintech project requirements and your startup goals. The technologies and frameworks mentioned in the blog are great to serve a specific purpose, therefore it is important to define the project scope, goal, and requirements very clearly. 

Fortunesoft, a leading fintech app development company, crafts bespoke fintech solutions for startups and leading organizations. We use modern architecture, frameworks, and cutting-edge technologies that guarantee the delivery of the best fintech services.