Can you Hire a FinTech Software Development Company With No Risk and Ensure Quality?
FinTech or Financial Technology started blooming back in the ’90s and in about 25 years has made progress beyond any predictions as well as gained popularity and application across industries. In its essence, FinTech is software and other modern technologies used by businesses that provide automated and improved financial services.
These improvements have transformed the ways we go about our day-to-day financial operations and more. From giving us digital access to our bank accounts through smartphones to automating some of the most important back-office processes, to employing the power of the blockchain for ease and security of financial transactions, it is absolutely clear that FinTech has the ability to and will further revolutionize our approach to financial affairs in the coming years.
FinTech has also made a big difference in employment habits and business models across industries with companies embracing the innovation and adjusting operations and compensation accordingly.
Investors, too, understand the overwhelming and metamorphic impact FinTech has had on businesses in the financial sector and far beyond it. It’s very well backed up by the investment statistics for FinTech and the general stats for the industry and its development direction.
If you’ve done your research and aren’t dependent on the locality of your software development team, chances are you’ve made a smart investment and decided to hire an offshore team of engineers. Since in programming and app building demand outgrows the supply, it’s much more reasonable and cost-efficient to hire an offshore software development company, so that they handpick the right FinTech developers to create the right financial software solutions for your business.
So, how does one hire FinTech software developers without risking the quality? We’ve prepared a simple list of things to do, check, and look at in the process of hiring financial IT specialists.
1. Investigate the main risks
- Miscommunication: Establishing proper and effective communication with your offshore team should be at the top of your priority list because setting clear goals for everybody determines the results you’ll get in the end and the time in which you’ll get them. Especially in matters like building financial software, clarity is key. One way to mitigate this risk is to visit the company’s office and meet the team, it will give you a good feel of the environment and attitudes. If you can’t visit, make sure to set up some testing interviews to look at the communication flow between all parties.
- Time zones: If your offshore team, as the name suggests, is way too offshore and your working hours don’t overlap, it might cause some issues. Most of the time developers can work independently, but it’s important that the schedule involves some hours in which the team can come together and discuss any ongoing tasks, issues or questions. This is one of the reasons why Ukraine and Eastern Europe, in general, have become such a popular offshore software development hub – due to its geographical location, it has an overlap in working hours with almost every other place in the world.
- Cultural barriers: People come from different cultural backgrounds and have different work ethics as a result. Some are rather incompatible and it’s important that you test that compatibility. For instance, developers in Asia are famous for hushing up issues they encounter out of fear of being punished. Make sure that your company has a clear culture code and perhaps, look at hiring FinTech developers from a place that has similar work ethics and cultural tendencies as the country of your business.
- Information leaks: Outsourcing development for an app or a web project for financial services, you will have to share a lot of sensitive information with the company you decide to hire. Sometimes this is personal data of the customer, others it’s confidential financial data. To minimize the risks of this information leaking your job is to ensure all the legal precautions for the data to stay secure and unabused. The bare minimum is having the company representatives and the developers themselves sign NDAs
- Choose the Company: The amount of places you can find offshore software developers, even as specific as fintech developers is overwhelming at first glance. However, with a little research, you will be able to distinguish several IT hiring hubs and come to realize that some of the most prominent of them are scattered across Central and Eastern Europe.
Ukraine is one of the front runners on the list of countries to outsource fintech software development while Qubit Labs is one of the top players in the field. We avidly follow all the latest trends in fintech and work side by side with financial and banking companies from all over the world and help create a new, smart approach to financial software development, banking processes and information management. We pride ourselves on transparency, agility and being fundamental in our work as we strive to bring FinTech outsourcing to the highest standards.
2. Check the company
Don’t be lazy and check multiple sources for the company reviews. You can visit websites like Producthunt, Trustpilot and Capterra for organized reviews, but we also suggest quick online research on top of that. In FinTech, working with sensitive data extra security is never an excess, but a good rule of thumb. Run a background check on all the companies you’ve narrowed down as potential hires.
3. Trial
Just like in any other job, there should be a probation period allowed to test the developer team and check the general compatibility. Ask for a 2-week to a month-long trial period with a test assignment before paying away large sums.
This way the developer(s) can demonstrate their best services without wasting anyone’s time and money. It’s enough time to ensure ethical, cultural and communicational compatibility while also a sufficient frame to create a significant amount of work deliverables to be able to judge on the quality of the job done.
4. Do not pay large sums upfront
To reiterate, someone asking for a big payment in advance is something alarming and you should definitely avoid any contractual agreements with such a condition. It’s a good idea to ask for a detailed breakdown of costs and scope of work, down to the most minute spending and proposed action. This will make contract management easier and much more reliable as both parties will be able to reference every little detail of the process without getting into arguments and risking any financial assets.
You should make sure that the team you’re hiring is capable of handling the load of work and the potential for its increase, as well as an increase in the team size and the duration of the project. The contract should contain clear terms for such occasions and a thorough procedure on handling any deviations from the contract.
5. Learn the guarantees
Explore your guarantee options. There should be some kind of a “warranty” on the work you get from your software development team. In this regard, ensuring the money-back guarantee is the best you can do. If you’re not satisfied with the end result you got from the developers, you shouldn’t have to pay for it. Naturally, you need to have a clear claim and have “all the receipts” to make a strong case and justify getting your money back.
A good start, however, is to include this kind of a clause in your initial contract and openly discuss it with the team you’re hiring. In 99% of the cases, people don’t set out to do a bad job intentionally, so this shouldn’t be a problem for your future hires.
6. Do not work without a contract
This should go without saying but is a surprisingly common faux pas on the part of many businesses. Sometimes they want to make things easier and not go through bothersome paperwork, especially if the project is small and they see it as a waste of time, or when the business owner knows someone on the team personally and is convinced in automatic integrity on the side of the team.
This is a wrong way to go and you should always draft and sign a contract with anyone you’re planning to pay money for a job they do for you. As mentioned before, the more detailed the contract, the better. If you can allow yourself to not save on legal fees drafting a contract, always let a legal professional do it for you.
When building an app for financial services and dealing with sensitive data, security is top priority. This might be the main reason most experts advise against hiring freelancers as fintech developers. Oftentimes individual freelancers are less of team players and don’t develop any attachment to the project, not caring too much about data sensitivity, but also about the maintenance after the project is completed.
To save money, sleep and nerve endings, we recommend dealing with a company that will pick out your team and help you with communications, back-office and any other issues that might arise.
To learn more about the benefits of hiring an offshore software development company as opposed to looking for separate freelancers, you can read our article on What on Offshore Development Center is. and How Dedicated Development Team Works.
Related Resources:
FinTech Innovations and Banking Solutions in Ukraine: Interview With Yuriy Kostiv
Software Development Trends: Expert View on Web & Mobile, Cybersecurity, and FinTech
