How to Build a Personal Finance App like Mint in 2023

adminMarch 14, 2023

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fintech | February 28, 2023

As consumers continue to grapple with financial uncertainty brought on by the coming recession, budgeting apps have become a popular way to track expenses and save money. According to the study, the top 10 financial planning apps saw an average 56% increase in downloads over the past five years. It has made personal finance app development highly profitable.

The best example is probably Mint – an app that has become the de facto standard in the fintech industry. It started out as just an investment tracker with few options, and now it has transformed into an AI-enabled financial advisory platform with 25 million users.

Reading: How to create an app like mint

So if you need to get into fintech, developing a Mint-like app could be the perfect choice to reach clients who want to control their budgeting and ad-hoc spending. And at Relevant, we’ll guide you through the process. Based on our experience building an app like Mint, we’ll cover the latest trends, must-have features, pricing structure, and technology stack. So let’s get started!

Personal Finance App Market Overview

Whether it’s budgeting, planning to pay off debt, or monitoring your credit score, your financial life needs constant control. And what could be more convenient for this purpose than a mobile application that anyone can install on a smartphone or tablet? This accessibility has resulted in mobile applications, not web versions, becoming the most promising segment in the financial industry. Nowadays almost every user has at least one banking or financial application installed on their mobile device.

Although money management techniques are quite complex, modern financial applications make them much simpler and clearer. Unsurprisingly, the personal finance app market is growing at a CAGR of 5.7% and is projected to reach nearly $1.49 billion by 2026. These predictions generate high demand for personal finance app development in the years to come.

Budget App Market Trends And Key Players

Building a personal finance application is a challenge when You don’t know your users and why they need such software. It gets even trickier when your budgeting app can’t keep up with the stiff competition. So, before developing an application like Mint, let’s get acquainted with some of its product’s direct competitors in the financial market:

Mint. The budget planner app allows you to connect bank accounts and credit cards to keep track of your income and expenses. It provides spend-based budget goals, including a daily budget overview. These goals can be changed and extended in the future.
Mvelopes. It is another alternative to the Mint that uses digital envelopes to help users control and manage their funds. The app helps manage your finances and saves a portion of your income (about 10%) from other expenses.
EveryDollar. The app allows users to visualize their income and expenses to quickly analyze and manage their finances. You can also add on-budget categories and see where they’re over or under budget.
PocketGuard. PocketGuard allows users to link all their bank accounts in one place and keep track of their income and expenses. This Mint alternative shows how much money they can spend and notifies them if they’re over budget.
You Need a Budget (YNAB). It’s a custom finance and expense tracker app that can save up to $600 in the first two months and over $6,000 in the first year.

Banking apps are in the game too

Traditional banks are also actively developing the personal financial management segment. Today almost every banking software has budgeting features, like Alliant Mobile Banking or Ally Mobile. And yes, they can compete with your future product. The good side is that you can also sell the application to the bank.

Chatbots and virtual assistants on the heels

Besides banking apps, your competitors will be FinTech chatbots that in the same work segment. They can be add-on components on platforms like banking or standalone apps. They keep track of expenses, offer budgeting options and give personal financial advice in conversation. Cleo, Plum and Digit are just a few FinTech chatbots out there to watch.

The audience is getting younger

Around 25% of the world’s population is under the age of 15 ; this number is increasing every year. As such, many personal finance management apps are aimed at a younger audience. That’s why apps that teach kids and teens how to manage their personal finances have become popular – check out Greenlight, Plan’it Prom, and BusyKid, for example.

Cryptocurrencies aren’t going anywhere

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The ability to connect crypto wallets in the same way as bank accounts is very interesting for an app. Allowing users to track and manage their crypto spend has become a competitive advantage. Apps like Mint allow managing bitcoin balances.Other solutions like OSOM and Coinbase mainly focus on crypto wallet management and cryptocurrency trading.

Multifunctionality is on-demand

A personal finance app should track income and expenses, give users financial knowledge, streamline their budgets and thus facilitate personal wealth management. All of this requires extensive functionality, as evidenced by the most popular personal finance apps.

What do customers expect from personal finance apps?

Once you figure out how to start a finance application, you must take into account the minimum functions required by the market. However, to make the FinTech software leaderboard, you have to meet users’ needs a little more than they expected. How exactly? Let’s discuss the nice features that could motivate customers to choose your financial solution over your competitors.

Data visualization

Infographics, charts and dashboards are necessary for a budgeting app because they draw attention excite and impress users. Displaying data in charts and infographics also makes the information understandable and manageable. Check out the functional dashboard in Airthings, where Relevant engineers helped the Norwegian technology company visualize air quality data in an easy-to-use interactive format.

Gamification

A mobile app for Personal Finance Mint isn’t meant to be fun. But it doesn’t have to be boring. Gamification includes game-like elements in a budgeting app to drive engagement. You can add features like a points system, rewards, and achievements to keep users interested and spur cost savings or something else.

Check out our case where the team at Relevant used the Kaizo gamified for support teams. Our engineers have built a scalable and maintainable solution with impressive UI/UX. Gamification of customer support led to increased user engagement and improved engagement.

Strong security and standards compliance

Sensitive data needs to be secured in any type of app. But security is especially important in a budgeting app because it has direct access to a user’s financial accounts. According to this survey, financial/banking data is the type of data people are most afraid of losing control over. This is why strong security is a must for a budgeting application.

In addition, a personal finance management app must comply with modern data processing and governance standards such as GDPR and ISO 270001. With this in mind, always build apps with secure cloud infrastructure and conduct penetration tests and security audits. And if you’re not sure how to meet the standards, ask Relevant’s consultants.

Integration with banks and payment systems

The obvious advantage of a budgeting app is the ability to link all your accounts together. Thanks to this convenience, one app can cover and monitor all user finances in one place. However, the budgeting application must support integration with various banks and payment systems to make this possible.

AI-Powered Financial Assistance

Using AI, you can provide deep financial coaching insights with suggestions and recommendations to effectively regulate your spending to meet goals. In addition, AI technology can automatically categorize expenses and show a holistic picture of which category users spent more money on. It allows you to greatly personalize your finance app and stay ahead of the competition.

Customer support and advice

We hope your budget tracker and planner apps App runs like clockwork and users don’t have any questions or complaints…but anything can happen. Therefore, 24/7 support, advice and prompt customer service can’t hurt.

What functions must the personal finance app have in 2023?

In this section we present the functions of personal finance apps fundamental to apps of this type and help you learn how to create a budget app like Mint. Which features will be in high demand in 2023?

Analytics and Reports

This feature allows users to track their financial activities to properly manage their money and save. Due to well-organized data, users can get daily, weekly, monthly and yearly reports to see income, expenses by categories, payee summaries, forecasts, etc.

Synchronization

Users of a Budgeting apps want all their money easily accessible on the same digital platform to view information and data about their financial situation. Your application needs to sync all user accounts, debit and credit cards, etc. to get the relevant information. This allows consumers to view information and data from all accounts in one digital environment and better manage their budget.

Registration and account creation

Each app begins with registration and account creation. But when it comes to finance, authorization and security require special attention.The best practices for protecting sensitive user data are two-factor authentication, fingerprint or voice recognition, and generating a unique security code.

Budgeting and cost categorization

You should specify: Budgeting option for users to plan your spending for a week, a month, or multiple months. Let your users set spending limits and the app will notify them before they overspend. Another great feature is showing your users exactly what they are spending their money on. A budgeting app can provide categories for expenses and automatically categorize users’ transactions to effectively track their expenses.

Investment Tracking

This feature allows users to track where expenses are going and where to invest your money. An investment tracker can help users keep track of market benchmarks and monitor all of their asset allocations, such as: B. Broker Accounts, Real Estate Investments, Mutual Funds, IRA Investments, etc.

Notifications and Alerts

This feature is required for the Finance application, so we recommend adding it to the functionality. However, make sure the reminders are timely and not intrusive. You can also consider other push notification scenarios, such as notifying your users when their goals are met or reminding them to stay on budget.

A brief Mint overview

Mint is a fantastic example of companies looking to gain market share with a personal finance management solution as it offers a variety of key benefits such as: B. Automation and robust security. However, there are certain disadvantages. Let’s take a closer look at Mint.

Mint’s functionalityProsCons

How apps like it Mint Make Money

Mint is free to use. The question is how does the app generate profit? Well, Mint has a very clever monetization model.

Freemium. This widely used monetization method offers a basic set of features for personal finance apps for free, while additional features are available for purchase.
Credit monitoring service. Mint offers free basic credit reports. Still, it offers users the premium reporting service Mint Credit Monitor for $16.99 per month.
In-app advertising. The core idea of this monetization method is to receive payments by showing users third-party ads based on their transaction history. The ad can be in different formats, e.g. B. banners, native ads, full-screen ads or videos. Also, users can pay to stop seeing ads.
Subscriptions. Applying this monetization strategy means that your users pay a monthly fee to use all features of the app .
Sales of Aggregated Financial Data. You may generate revenue by aggregating financial data about consumer trends and then selling it to third parties for advertising, research and marketing purposes. Many apps use this strategy, including Mint.
Paid app. This monetization method means you only buy your app once and give users all of its features.
Referral fees. You earn money when users buy the financial items your app promotes. For example, Mint offers services and products such as credit cards, insurance, loans and much more. Every time customers take Mint’s advice, the app gets a referral payment.

Building an App Like Mint: A Step-by-Step Guide

Now , Where You Know With all the features and monetization strategies of your personal finance app, it’s time to take a step-by-step guide to developing it.

Step 1. Run a preliminary Analysis by

A Preliminary analysis begins with a plan and study of your product’s marketability and marketability. This phase also assesses the strengths and weaknesses of your project, as well as possible risks. The outcome of the activity should be evidence of the decision to continue or cancel the project.

Tip from our experts: The study must have a clear and complete scope to ensure essential factors that influence the decision-making process are not left out.

Step 2. Define your target group

You’ve decided to proceed with the project and that’s great. Now it’s time to define your audience to understand your users’ pain points and the problems they want to solve. Only by getting to know your user can you define the functionality and develop an effective marketing plan.

Tip from our experts: Target markets with low entry barriers have a better chance of success (e.g. students , families or seniors)

Step 3. Make a list of requirements

Make a list of requirements for functionality, design, size, number of features, etc. If the set of Once the characteristics are defined, the next step is to rank them in order of importance. This strategy will help you determine the most valuable features to include in the app.

Tip from our experts: We recommend that you describe the requirements in as much detail as possible. This will make it easier and clearer for your future team to create a finance app.

Step 4. Choose a tech stack

Once you sign up for your personal finance features app, you can choose the tools and technology you need to make this solution a reality. You can choose either native or cross-platform budgeting app development. If you go for the native approach, you’ll need to build two separate apps using different technologies, which means you’ll need to hire two development teams.

Step 5. Assemble a team

Strive to create the “next Mint” among them to build personal finance apps, remember that developing them requires technical skills and a deep understanding of the market you’re entering. So you need to find professionals who can develop a successful fintech product. A team to create a custom money management app consists of:

A project manager
A UI/UX designer
At least 2 mobile developers (or more, depending on the complexity and time frame of the project)
At least 2 backend engineers
2 QA engineers

Tip from ours Experts: By outsourcing app development, you can hire professionals at a significantly lower cost. Outsourced developers can create an end-to-end app or just be a temporary addition to your company’s capabilities.

Step 6. Develop an MVP

A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) allows a team to gather the maximum amount of validated knowledge about customers with the least amount of effort. Technically, it’s the product with the highest ROI divided by risk.

Tip from our experts: You need to be strategic when deciding what limited functionality to include in your MVP shall be. Once the customer retention rate is satisfactory for the MVP, your developers can scale the app by introducing more customer-centric features.

Step 7. Select a monetization strategy

How will your financial application generate income to generate? Think about a monetization strategy based on the desires of your specific user base and the strengths of your app.

Tip from our experts: Return to the section on developing apps like Mint back money and choose what suits you. You can combine multiple app monetization methods or create a unique approach.

Step 8. Proceed to the UX/UI design phase

When it comes to financial services, UI/UX -Design used to be well organized, clean and easy to manage for users. You must ensure that each option in the personal finance app is accessible in a maximum of three steps.

Tip from our experts: We recommend balancing minimalism with attractive elements, using simple language and not overwhelming customers. Try to replace the long block of text with visual elements such as enticing images or animations to avoid illegible information.

Step 9. Start development phase

Development requires skilled specialists and expertise to correctly implement all functions of the finance app. When the scope of work is approved, the developers start implementing the financial application features step-by-step based on the chosen tech stack.

Tip from our experts: At Relevant , wise we typically assign two experienced front-end and back-end developers to this phase.

Step 10. Test your app

Run manual and automated tests to verify whether it works or not parts of your finance app. Manual testing allows QAs to uncover bugs in the earliest stages of the software development lifecycle, while automated testing helps get instant product feedback and increases test coverage.

Tip from our experts: Include testers in the core development cycle to ensure risks are mitigated in a timely manner.

Step 11. Launch your personal Finance app and keep it maintenance

Once everything has been verified, launch your finance app into production. Provide follow-up application support to resolve product inconsistencies, fix errors and continue updating.

Tip from our experts: Don’t forget to promote Your app via social media, SEO-optimized content, paid ads, etc. Also, to avoid publishing issues, make sure you deploy your product as recommended by the Apple Store or Google Play.

Personal Finance App Development Cost

Basically, a personal finance management app like Mint takes 2000-2500 hours to develop.Now let’s calculate the total cost of development using the average rates of engineers:

UI/UX design: 375 hours x $40 = $15,000.
Application development ( iOS) : 780 hours x $36 = $28,080.
Server-side app development: 920 hours x $36 = $33,120.
Client-side app development: 270 hours x $36 = $9,720.
Approximate total cost: $85,920.

Why relevant?

Working with an experienced team gives you a mature development process and a highly skilled team to complete all critical work on time. This way, you can avoid the development and administration hassle and ensure that the solution conforms to fintech industry rules and your business goals.

At Relevant, we provide our clients with the best technologies, tools and exercises to transform to get the idea right. From developing a unique value proposition, we support development through final delivery and post-release support. And it’s not just words!

Check out these beautiful FinTech apps with stunning dashboards and interfaces for inspiration – Payroll and FirstHomeCoach. And if you want to create a budgeting app that has a chance to dethrone Mint, drop us a line.

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