MVPs are a fast way for you to get into a market while enhancing your customers’ experience. Creating a product and shipping it out the door before your competitor is the cornerstone of competitive business, and the banking sector is no different.
We want to explore the concept of developing an MVP in banking and how the process can help your company get new and exciting products into the hands of your customers while improving their banking MVP experience.
What is the purpose of MVP in banking?
An MVP, or Minimum Viable Product, is simply a good product idea that is released as quickly as possible while maintaining a high standard of quality, functionality and usefulness.
It can be thought of as a rapid prototyping and deployment development style that is usually a collaboration between partners and technologies with a solid idea or proof of concept.
It encourages a mindset that accepts failure and demands innovation. It is a Lean framework that favors simplicity over-complicated products and development.
In the banking and Fintech sector, this is quite difficult to do because when it comes to finances there can be no errors. Imagine logging into your banking app only to find that your balance is not correct. You would not want to do business with a bank that couldn’t guarantee your funds. For this reason, a lot of a product development team’s time will be spent on identifying problems and edge cases that could cause major issues further down the road.
Banking is also a highly regulated market: if you do not comply with the set standards of the regulatory body in your country or region then you risk not being allowed to compete in the market.
This can be as a result of a fine, license revocation, or any other serious punitive measure that a regulatory authority might issue to your company. With these 2 examples in mind, you need to think about the exposure to risk that you are opening yourself up to by rushing to the market first with a brilliant idea.
Download our free whitepaper FinTech Security and Regulatory Compliance. Best practices and checklists.
How to prioritize and decide on an initial (and relevant) feature set for MVP
Having a great idea is the easy part of app development. However, deciding what actually ships with a product is quite another matter.
The timeline of many of the development cycle steps is drastically decreased in order to meet the strict deadlines that are set out by the project’s release dates. The key to successfully launching your banking MVP is prioritizing features and functionality with each release.
It is important to remember that this is a Minimum Viable Product, so what stays and what goes in the initial release I paramount to successfully launching the MVP in Banking.
If you get into the market and start attracting customers with a defective product or service, then you encounter two immediate issues: customer dissatisfaction and regulatory scrutiny.
Both of these issues will affect your product and company going forward. You will also lose the momentum that your product launch gained in the first place, giving your competitors the edge and an advantage over you.
Research and investigating your idea is paramount if you are going to successfully launch anything in the banking sector.
The competition is intense and the margins between competitors are very low. This means that the impact that a single functioning product has on the market is massive. Getting an MVP out of the gates first is crucial in the competitive world of finance and banking.
The advantages of releasing an MVP is that there is room for further growth and enhancements.
You can start to experiment with new features as the product scales. New features and enhanced services that are tested and released can be packaged as part of a pricing hierarchy, giving your customers the choice of spending more money to access additional functionality.
As your product matures, you can then start to build upon the tried and tested features of the MVP and sculpt it into an industry-leading example of how a product should be.
You, therefore, need to prioritize your banking MVP features according to your market research. What are the most sought after features in your app? What are the most beneficial parts of the product to your customers? Which are the easiest to implement? Which features add the most value to your product stack and encourage user interaction? All of these key features must be weighed and prioritized when you release your product into the market.
Because of the outlined pressure and competition in this market, it is absolutely necessary for banking institutions to explore new products and iterate them rapidly if they are to differentiate themselves from the competition. We, therefore, need to think about an MVP not as the solution to a marketing problem, but rather as the starting point of exciting innovation and invention in an already crowded market.
Finding the Right Banking MVP Partner
The process of MVP development is an iterative one, which means that what you release today will soon be updated and built upon based on the customer and market feedback.
You can think of an MVP as a work in progress that needs to fulfil specific needs from the first day of its deployment. This is where prioritization comes into play.
In order to successfully do this in the planning stages of your app, you need a highly-skilled partner that understands how critical this is to the overall success of your product.
S-PRO is able to fill the role of a technical and advisory partner that has access to the most critical tools in app development and analysis.
S-PRO can conduct market analysis, competitor analysis, SWOT analysis, and a complete and detailed project analysis during the finalization and approval stages of your MVP’s development life cycle.
S-PRO understands Fintech and Open Banking requirements and can help you with your next project.
Conclusion
Most great ideas start out as a long list of fantastic features that would be great to release all at once.
The truth of the matter in banking software development is that for each new and innovative product feature that is released, there are many processes in the background that need to be developed (both software and procedural) in order to make them a reality. The more features that are added to the initial release of the product slows down the progress towards releasing the product.
The most important aspect of this process is to feature prioritization before the application development work is undertaken. Valuable resources need to be freed up during development if you are going to get your banking MVP to market first.
Once you have gauged the value and interest of your product then you can start to decide on the next steps. This is where partnering with a company like S-PRO can really save you time and money during the arduous process of banking software development.
A banking MVP can cost as much as $95,000, however, everything is determined by the complexity of the project. Contact S-PRO for an approximate estimate for your project today.
