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Technology has completely transformed the world of financial transactions and whole business models. Big financial companies, with the biggest market capitalizations for over a century, are crumbling and are threatened by disruptive technology players in this space.
These tech intrusions are transforming every customer-facing touchpoint, leading to game-changing customer experiences as well as streamlining operations to save costs, and boost the bottom line. Legacy finance enterprises are also acknowledging the critical importance of modernizing their workflows by investing in strategic technologies.
One of the big advantages that technology offers is the ability to reach out to the customers directly through applications that can be conveniently and quickly accessed on the go, via mobile devices.
However, the path to a successful technological investment is not easy and straightforward. With a plethora of technology vendors in the market, how do you choose the best fit for your business – providing satisfactory levels of scale, ability and security.
For this, the company needs to first create a viable product blueprint and make sure that it is what the user will want to use. Taking a deep dive into the market to understand the end-user pain points (if any) with the existing solutions need to be the right first step to make this possible. For this, you really need to talk to your target user groups, try to get into their shoes and do extensive market research to have an accurate assessment of what you should be building in order to solve real challenges and gain a greater adoption for your product.
Next, you must talk to an experienced developer to discuss what you are planning to build, and what architecture will be best suited for this and how to go about it – assessing the time needed for deployment, scalability needed, traffic expected and the desired user workflows on your application. This discussion will give you insights into useful areas, such as costs that will likely be incurred, the team mix that you will need to hire to build this and what is going to be the expected timeline to push the idea into the production stage.
Next, you may need to get approval from a higher authority on the costs, idea, business value of the project and the additional people that you’ll need.
Assuming that all went well, and you have onboarded some great talents to work on your team, the next step would be to begin building a series of prototypes – from low fidelity to high.
It is always a good idea to build a prototype because it will give a chance to see your product idea in a tangible form and share it with others. Not only can this lead to valuable feedback, but also give you a fair assessment of how much your idea is going to appear once it is live on the market. Feedback on usability, workflows, and design with a high fidelity prototype will help you refine your idea further by running it through a diverse group of people.
After the prototyping stage, comes the actual development phase – culminating in the product beta launch. At this stage, you can ask the marketing team to start creating awareness campaigns around this – which will give the product an anticipation buzz in the market.
Meanwhile, you should start enrolling users from your target group for the beta launch phase. Once the product is ready for the beta, you should invite your beta users to sign up for the app. in exchange for suitable benefits.
This beta launch is important because, prior to going for a full-scale launch, this stage will give you any potential red flags such as those concerned with any server downtimes, security vulnerabilities or any usability optimizations that you might have overlooked. A successful beta launch and prolonged app use by the beta users will give you the confidence to go ahead with a full-scale product launch into the market.
Now, you arrive at the D-day, i.e. the day of your product launch. Make sure that you receive the go-ahead from your marketing team for this, since they will play a major role at this stage. The communication needs to be sent out on as much blast radius as possible.
Make sure that your employees are talking and excited about it as their enthusiasm and word of mouth will play a crucial role. The announcement of the product launch should be made on all of your owned channels – from website to social media and affiliate links – preferably with a vision statement from one of the executives. It would be beneficial if you are also able to partner with any media house to cover your product launch.
With the required buzz in place, make sure to give some enticing offers for the initial set of users who sign up – to encourage more sign-ups.
Hopefully, you have got a fair idea of the different efforts and steps that you need to carry out in order to execute a successful fintech app launch. While it may seem daunting at first during the product ideation phase, and the journey may seem long and arduous, by making a proper strategy and keeping everything aligned throughout, you will be able to find success with the product launch.