FinTech is turning out to be one of the most disruptive and exciting segments in digital technology. But it probably wouldn’t have happened if the Great Recession didn’t wreak havoc on the global economy nine years ago.
In the aftermath of the financial crisis, trust was destroyed and people wanted better options. They wanted more transparent and affordable solutions that didn’t have a high potential collapsing overnight.
This environment created a huge opportunity for startups to come in and meet the needs of the market. As the FinTech space continues to explode, it has also attracted an enormous amount of venture capital totaling approximately $17.4 billion in 2016, up by 10.9%, with 1,436 deals.
At the same time, FinTech is also reinventing how money is raised and managed. It now allows both the general public and businesses to avoid banks through mobile payment, crowdfunding, and apps to access the same information that’s available to multinational financial giants.
For example, you can transfer money much faster and cheaper with TransferWise, raise capital for your startup through Kickstarter, or benefit from a new standard in online payments for businesses with Stripe.
If you’re thinking about launching your own FinTech startup to disrupt the traditional financial services model, you will need to know what technology would best suit your endeavor. The right technology for your startup should enable the following:
It should also allow you to offer state-of-the-art functions to the end user based on what your product is trying to achieve. When it comes to tech stacks, there plenty out there, but the most common are based on the highly versatile programming language Java (and most coders know it well).
You may want to read: How to choose the right tech stack for your software development project.
Regardless of whether you want to build a FinTech app or a website, the front-end and back-end technology must be completely understood as they perform very different and independent functions.
While you don’t have to understand how it works, it would be a good idea to look out for the technologies mentioned below when engaging in discussions with developers.
The front-end is what the end user sees and experiences, so the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) will play a vital role in the success of your project. While the design will usually be developed on a product from the Adobe Creative Suite, it’s the code that will make everything work the way you want it to.
While you can code the front-end elements from scratch, you will quickly burn through your capital if you take this approach. The better option here is to take advantage of massive ecosystems and solutions that are often available at no cost.
On the front-end, you usually see technologies like LAMP (often paired with some sort of MVC framework), Ruby on Rails (with a few other Ruby frameworks), Java and Scala (sometimes with GWT), and Python (with Django, Pylons, and Flask). AngularJS will also play an important role if you’re building single-page web apps, while ReactJS might be used for the UI, and Bootstrap if you intend of going mobile first.
The back-end is where most of the coding will take place. It’s fairly open with a wide range of technologies with a mix of SQL and NoSQL storage solutions (BigTable clones, Cassandra, HBase, MySQL, MongoDB, Postgres, Raven, etc.).
You may want to read: Choosing the right framework for your software project: Vuejs vs Reactjs
Memcached and Redis are quite common in this space including functional programming languages to crunch things like F# and Erlang. But whatever stack you choose to go with, you have to ensure that is seamlessly scalable.
Scalability is vital as you have to anticipate your product making an impact on the market and growing rapidly. If you approach the build in this manner, it will be easy to add functions with little to no development.
As FinTech evolves, you can expect more new technologies to make an impact on development. As a result, going with a solution that’s Java-based can go a long way when it comes to integration and accessing top tech talent.
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