Challenger bank: Product strategy and roadmap for a cryptocurrency-fiat banking app

Introduction

The client decided to develop a new challenger bank and finance management application available for Android and IOS that will compete with legacy banking providers. The app was additionally designed to exchange FIAT-crypto operations.

Challenges

You have two options when creating a new challenger bank:

• Develop everything from scratch
• Use already-made components from third-party providers.

In 90% of cases, the second option is better, because it allows startups to save a lot of time. So together with the client, we choose the pragmatic approach.

Integration between components

Our main challenge was to analyze and choose the right providers. Moreover, we had to conduct integrations between components. This task is definitely more complicated than it may seem at first glance.
Primarily because the product will operate not only with the most well-known currencies such as the euro, dollar, or pound but also with the Polish zloty and the currencies of Scandinavian countries. We had to make sure that the selected providers would offer us the possibility of supporting these currencies.
Secondly, the application has to give the possibility to exchange different Cryptocurrencies. For example, to store Cryptocurrency wallets for users, we had to provide Blockchain technology. For this purpose, we conducted an integration with a third-party provider. This gives us a whole range of functions related to the creation of wallets, processing of transfers, access to transaction history, etc.

Legal consultations

As it was mentioned before, the distinguishing feature of the product is supposed to be its security. For this reason, the technical analysis we conducted was very, very broad. On top of that, we did a lot of legal consultations to make sure that we always choose safe solutions.
The next challenge for us will be creating the platform for customer service. For this purpose, we want to study the needs of customers and also do research on which solutions will be optimal for people who will deal with the service.

Discovering the UVP

This is not the first time Pragmatic Coders had done a lot of important work before the fintech software development process began! We were able to convince the client that it was worth conducting competitive analysis and market research to discover Unique Value Proposition (UVP) for future users.

We’ve done the research and found that many users of similar apps complain about poor customer service. When something bad happens to their finances, people have no one to ask for help.
Having this knowledge, the client decided that excellent customer service should be the distinguishing factor of their challenger bank. They will also try to build a reputation for it in terms of security and reliability.

Defining the product scope

Note that the product is intended to compete in terms of features with other similar applications, so the scope is very broad and a lot of work needs to be completed before the first version will be released. Here are the features included in the scope that we developed together with the client:

• Basic banking functionalities;
• Payments using traditional currencies (FIAT) and crypto;
• Mobile payment;
• Digital wallets;
• Payment cards that also support Cryptocurrencies;
• Currency exchange:

  • FIAT →  FIAT

  • FIAT →  Crypto

  • Crypto → FIAT.

Summary

The product development is still in progress. We have achieved a lot so far, from creating the product strategy, through preparing the design, technical analysis, and legal consultations, to the working features. Additionally, the current version of the app supports such cryptocurrencies as Bitcoin or Stellar. We are now working on Ethereum.
Thanks to the previously conducted analysis, we have a clear plan on how to further develop the application and we can’t wait to finally present the finished version of the product to the users.