Hire Fintech Software Developers

If you’re deciding between hiring fintech developers in-house and outsourcing your project, perhaps this piece will help you choose. The high demand for fintech developers means it can be hard to find unemployed experts in your location. This prompts many businesses to look for engineers in outsourcing countries — a decision they don’t regret. Here are some reasons why.

Instant access to in-demand talents

Without the constraints of finding local talents, your hiring range expands to the entire world. And believe us, outsourcing vendors know which technologies, frameworks, and services are hot right now. After all, their business depends on providing the most up-to-date software engineering services to clients. So, say, when Kotlin beats Java in Android development, outsourcing companies will rearrange their offering accordingly faster than you can say “functional programming.”

Faster project workflows

Instead of assembling a team of experts one by one, it’s much more beneficial to start working with an already formed team that has niche expertise. This is critical as even senior engineers can make mistakes without prior experience in developing financial software.

Another benefit of working with a ready-made team is that they have all the processes polished and their workflows are in place. Every team member knows what to do at each given moment in time, shortening the overall SDLC.

Industry-specific knowledge

Outsourcing vendors work with dozens of clients, which allows them to polish their knowledge of each specific industry. For example, the outsourcing teams that have experience developing apps for the finance sector are skilled in:

• Cloud computing because they know Microsoft Azure is trusted by 95% of Fortune 500 companies, including the world’s biggest banks
• Big Data analytics because your app needs to provide and consume valuable data on demand
• Data protection and cybersecurity because having a proven record of building fintech app security solutions means your clients’ data is safe.

If you’ve warmed up to the idea of outsourcing – great. But before you start roaming through vendors, you have to make sure the team you select has all the appropriate skills.

There are several ways fintech startups and enterprises can find the required expertise:

• Freelancers. Multiple platforms like Upwork, Toptal, Freelancer, and others allow you to hire fintech developers of any seniority. The downsides involve the managerial overhead of working with a distributed team and dealing with potential sensitive information leaks.
• Remote employees. A company can hire engineers remotely, and many have been doing so long before the pandemic. Such employees are a part of your team even though they don’t work from the same office. This also means that you are the one covering the legal matters and providing the person with the necessary equipment.
• Outsourcing companies and agencies. You can delegate forming a team for your fintech project to an outsourcing agency. While they usually have pools of developer profiles at their fingertips, you may get a group of superstars with inflated egos instead of a well-trained team sharing a result-oriented mindset.
• Relevant. You can work with Relevant, a fintech outsourcing and outstaffing company housing dedicated software development teams that have delivered dozens of software solutions for finance and know the pitfalls and best practices of finance product delivery.

First of all, mind fintech developers' experience. Sure, general knowledge of fintech apps is good, but working with developers that have already delivered products like yours, made mistakes, and know how to avoid them in the future is much better.

Now, think of this: is your fintech solution going to become your key product, or is it an extension to your range of offers? How simple or feature-rich should it be? Will it be a one-time-job, or are you planning to keep developing this product over the years? Answering questions like these helps find the right approach to fintech development.

Your choice should also depend on the app type you are going to develop. It can be:

• Remittance software
• A P2P payment app
• Mortgage software
• A mobile wallet
• A wealth management app
• A money lending app
• An insurance or digital banking platform

And while you’re deciding, mind that after the introduction of the Open Banking initiative in the UK, the market has been looking for “hybrid” fintech products, where a single platform can deliver a wide range of functions. The latest revision of the Payment Services Directive (PSD2) demands that financial institutions provide easy API access to integrate with third-party products while ensuring data security. But your skilled engineers should already know that.

Finding a developer for a fintech company will be a bit easier if you interview the candidates according to the following criteria:

• Compliance. Fintech is a heavily regulated industry, so your future product should comply with the laws and regulations in the jurisdictions where it will be used. The developers should foresee legal compliance issues and know how to make a product that meets the requirements.
• Cybersecurity. The US government has issued new requirements for banks and other organizations on how to safeguard their customer data. This is vital, as banks and financial institutions are targeted by hackers and fraudsters 300 times more often than companies from other industries. The least your developers can do is build the product with OWASP’s top-10 API cybersecurity requirements in mind.
• Database management and ETL. Fintech products often face high traffic volumes with loads of events happening at once. The engineers should be able to work with Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, Amazon SQS, and other event queue managers.
• Soft skills. At the end of the day, your team has to be able to communicate and collaborate to get things done right.

However, there are still things to consider when selecting among a pool of candidates with similar skills. How to hire programmers for a fintech startup that will not make costly blunders?

Speaking of skills, using the right tech stack is also critical. So look for fintech developers who have experience with:

• Python, Django, Flask. Most of the back-end operations, as well as Big Data analytics, are performed using Python and either Django or Flask frameworks. Python scripts are heavily used in banking apps, so a working knowledge of Python is a must.
• Java. Java is a perfect choice for building fintech apps as it’s secure and supported by many operating systems (including Android). Java and Kotlin expertise is necessary to deliver highly-performant and user-friendly applications.
• Swift and Objective-C. You won’t be able to build native iOS versions of your fintech apps without knowing these languages.
• React Native, Flutter. These frameworks for cross-platform development come in handy for reusing up to 90% of the codebase while covering the broadest possible range of devices.
• C, C++, C#, Node.js. This family of languages is known for its high speed of data processing, making them a good choice for PoS systems, real-time data processing algorithms, and advanced computations.
• JavaScript. There are many features that can’t be built without JavaScript.
• React, Angular, Vue.js. Popular frameworks for building neat, visually pleasing, and highly-functional front-end components for your apps.
• Hadoop, Presto, Kafka. Big Data analytics gathering and processing are impossible without an in-depth understanding of these tools. So if you expect actually useful analytics that generates revenue, make sure your engineers know a thing or two about them.

On top of that, your tech team members should know the aspects of cloud platforms like AWS, IBM Cloud, GCP, Microsoft Azure. Not to mention they should be working with Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins – the DevOps tools used to deliver and run your fintech software.

Relevant has conducted thorough research of the factors influencing the costs of hiring financial software developers in different regions across the globe. Here are the results.

We can’t say for Asia or Latin America, but Eastern Europe has proven to be a reliable destination for hiring dedicated software development teams. Ukraine’s outsourcing culture and rates make it one of the best countries for hiring fintech software developers in 2021.