How to Make Your Mobile Banking App Infinitely Scalable

In this article, we explore the biggest challenges of making a quality mobile banking or payment app, as well as the features that are most important for you to include. We outline ever-present concerns like cost and security, define tools like templating and the benefits of client-side processing, then introduce how the Apryse PDF SDK can integrate into your banking app to help make it more efficient, flexible, and scalable.

This article is for anyone in mobile banking app development who is looking for ways to give their financial services app a better user experience. You’ll get actionable advice on how to make improvements your users will notice, as well as learn how other banks are already benefiting.

Mobile banking applications have become more popular than ever. As of 2022, around 65 percent of people in the U.S. are estimated to use digital banking. As for payment apps, the global market for them was worth almost $2 trillion in 2021.

This explosive growth has fueled a fair amount of competition. Nearly every bank now offers an app you can use to check your bank account balance, transfer funds, pay debit or credit cards, find an ATM, and much more. But that doesn’t mean they are all created equal. All of these apps must contend with technical challenges that can make it difficult to create a truly safe and useful solution. The following are some of the most formidable.

Between 2021 and 2022, fraudulent transactions originating from mobile apps grew by as much as 600 percent. Solving this challenge is not an easy task. Fintech apps need to use a multi-layered security approach in order to anticipate and block any potential threats. This should include tried-and-true technologies like multi-factor authentication and biometrics, a strict adherence to coding standards, and a keen focus on securing user data at every step.

In the crowded mobile banking and payment space, no app can afford to give its users a slow or buggy experience. Instead, developers need to ensure their app delivers the convenience their users expect. They should be able to check their transaction history wherever and whenever they want to, as well as open new accounts, download bank statements, and even chat with customer support.

Fintech app developers need to take a long-term view to ensure cost sustainability. While the initial development costs can be planned out relatively easily by considering the features and complexity an app needs, the ongoing costs of maintenance and growth require more foresight. Developers have to come up with strategies that will allow their application to deliver value from day one, while also allowing it to scale appropriately as the app gains users.

There are countless features various online banking industry experts and developers would probably call “essential” for a mobile banking application. But when it comes to addressing the challenges laid out above, we’ve boiled it down to two we consider indispensable to think about during the development process.

With its deep feature set and infinite customization, Apryse can provide your users with a seamless and reliable mobile banking and payment experience that is designed with security and scalability in mind. Our PDF SDK can integrate easily into your Flutter, JavaScript, or even C# project, providing you with a fast, efficient, and feature-rich way to create, render, and view documents. Some of its features include:

But what about the challenges of mobile banking and payments? Let’s explore how Apryse can help you build a more powerful, secure, and scalable application.

Apryse makes it easy to create templates in any application, as well as generate PDFs from DOCX, XLSX, or PPTX templates. You can also create templates in any application, and their data can be merged from any data source in JSON format. Conversion from MS Office templates and data merging occurs client-side without any server-side dependencies.

Because your users will already want to view bank statements, download invoices, or otherwise engage in behaviors that are conducive to templating, all this will can make it much easier to run and manage your app. By anticipating user behaviors and building out templates that just require the user’s data and nothing more, you can reduce much of the processing burden and improve your app’s performance by orders of magnitude.

Curious to see all this in action? Play around with this template demo to see what you can do. Or, if you’d like to preview the capabilities of our SDK, we’ve put together a guide on how to use the Apryse WebViewer to generate PDFs from DOCX, XLSX, or PPTX templates.

By empowering you to create mobile banking apps that use client-side processing, Apryse makes it possible to build a more cost-effective and secure solution. More than likely, your users will look at their balances or recent transactions on an infrequent basis. One hour might bring 100 requests. The next might bring 100,000. Building a server-side infrastructure that can handle these loads is not likely to be cost-effective. You’ll either be paying for too much processing capabilities or, worse, too little.

As for security, processing requests server-side will require multiple different handoffs. After authentication, a user will pass their token back to the server to retrieve their information. Then, after making a specific request (e.g., a bank statement), another call to the server has to be made in order to process and send back that information. All this leaves multiple opportunities for a “middle man” attacker to intercept the user’s data. Apryse’s client-side processing capabilities eliminate those extra trips to the server altogether, reducing the chances an attacker has to intercept financial data

As an added benefit, Apryse can make your mobile app run faster and scale infinitely. Because it keeps user data on their own device, rather than requiring your application to call back to a server whenever a user wants to bring up a file, users can quickly generate documents. Especially when combined with templating, this can help make the user experience faster and more streamlined.

Plus, because storing and processing vital data and documents doesn’t rely on an external server infrastructure, Apryse enables your app to scale effortlessly. No matter how many users your app is serving, Apryse will make sure it runs smoothly.

First Business Bank, based in Wisconsin, provides full-service commercial banking, private wealth, and bank consulting services. They have over $2 billion under management and are listed in the Global Select Market, NASDAQ’s most selective tier.

However, because they work across so many different lines of business, bank employees were inundated with paperwork. They needed a better way to interact, edit, and manage the many documents they processed each day.

The Apryse WebViewer offered First Business Bank the comprehensive set of features they needed – such as smooth templating, superior rendering performance, and plug-and-play code – while also integrating smoothly into their existing Salesforce workflow. This allowed them to get 70 percent of their required document functionality up and running within just two days.

Read the full case study to learn more about how Apryse is helping improve First Business Bank.

Developing a mobile banking application that delivers value requires you to tackle significant security, performance, and cost challenges. But don’t be discouraged. With its deep feature set and capabilities like client-side processing, templating, and more, Apryse gives you the tools to address these challenges directly, enabling you to build an app that is secure, scalable, and cost-effective.

Read more about what our WebViewer can offer you, or head over to our GitHub repository to start playing around with our code. You can also test out all our features now.

Are you facing challenges building an app in the fintech space? We want to hear about it! Reach out to tell us – or to see if we can offer any help.