Front-end development standards and best practices: what your financial services enterprise can learn from modern startups

Over the last decade or so, you may have noticed a certain trend in financial services products. Startups have gained market share by creating products that are completely modernized, making legacy enterprises look archaic. Modern digital financial services products are now sleeker, more intuitive, and include features that surprise and delight users.

These products are completely customer-forward. And that means more established financial services enterprises should be asking one very important question: Is our digital product keeping up?

You may already know the answer. Your experience feels out of date. It’s slow, it’s underperforming, and it’s not accessible. Your UI lacks the kind of charming interactions you so often see from newer financial services platforms like Robinhood and Betterment. The reality is your product is overdue for a tune-up — if not a complete renovation.

Why modernizing your financial services product is worth it

As your company’s tech lead or chief engineer, you’re likely feeling dissuaded by the cost of such a revamp. Furthermore, you’re not even sure how to create the architecture to support the features you’re seeing from startups, like robo-advisors or digital loan products. Your expertise may be in building infrastructure that’s functional and complies with regulation, and less on the front-end user experience.

Plus, if your verticals or business lines are solid, and you’ve been able to hang on to your customer base, is it worth modernizing your product at all?

This “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitude is short-sighted. Think about retail and commerce stores during the pandemic. Companies that didn’t have an ecommerce experience ready for their customers when the world shut down struggled to stay afloat. Some closed altogether.

Similarly, an established enterprise like yours will be edged out of the market by more modern financial services companies if you can’t keep up with user needs and expectations. Times have changed. Your product can’t only be a functional and compliant one, and you can’t rely on your customer base forever. 

Global pandemic notwithstanding, a new audience of young investors has changed the entire financial services product landscape, and they demand a customer-forward experience. If you don’t cater to them and modernize your product, you will be left behind. 

3 essential steps to build a modern, customer-focused digital financial product

Reaching a new market of consumers requires a CX that both delights and encourages brand loyalty. Financial services enterprises can (and should) learn a lot from startups and new product companies in their space. In fact, doing so is paramount to your survival. 

To be fair, you’ve got a steeper mountain to climb. Newer digital products in the financial services space have less to overcome when designing a customer-centric experience. They’re building from the ground up and aren’t necessarily encumbered by legacy constraints and outdated technology. Nevertheless, there are still ways your financial services enterprise can incorporate a customer-centric experience into your existing digital product. 

Here’s how you can meet your customers where they are and reach the “new gold standard” of digital financial services products.

1. Assess the financial services landscape

Look to the startups and newer players in your space to gain insights on modern branding, experiences, and technology. These startups thrive on experiences, and so can you. But as you identify the modern features your customers expect, don’t devalue your company’s reputation in the industry, either. Your established brand can give you a competitive advantage over newer companies. Legacy combined with modern products will deliver more value to your customers, and you’ll be a force to reckon with.

2. Ask your customers what they want from a digital product

You want to build what your users need, not what you think they want. So it’s critical for you to solicit feedback from your customers to build a great CX that makes sense for them. Customer feedback will illuminate the gaps and opportunities within your CX and also provide valuable insight into the other financial products your customers are using. 

Which products and services can they not live without? Which provide the most utility? Most likely, their answers will point to digital products that are incredibly intuitive and provide a wide range of meaningful uses.

Here’s where customer insight programs and user testing comes in. Once you discover what features are most valuable for customers, you can integrate them into your app, continuing to test the features and improve them.

3. Push the boundaries of your brand

If you want to gain market share, you can’t be afraid to push your brand to meet the standards of today’s (and tomorrow’s) consumers. Retail investors entering the financial investment space expect streamlined, multi-use products. This translates to other financial experiences such as digital mortgage loan and tax return applications. You may think comparing your services to others’ is like apples and oranges, but if your customers demand more innovation from your product, you need to deliver.

Does your tech stack support your digital product transformation?

If you want to “go big” with your CX, your team needs the right tools and tech features. Certain platforms and systems have inflexible architectures that make it difficult to integrate with 3rd parties. Some lack content personalization features altogether. If you want to compete with the most modern financial services platforms, you need to invest in the proper technology that will get the job done and then some.

Here’s an obvious sign you’re working with outdated tech: your front-end experience is coupled with it’s data source. This is a cumbersome and outmoded system. These days, modern financial services products work with decoupled architectures. Decoupled achritectures help to make experiences and personalization consistent across channels. Each front-end experience in the product is connected through a set through APIs to create a modern, iterative experience. 

A coupled experience, on the other hand, will require a larger lift from your tech team any time they update a feature.

Partnering with an outsourced digital product team can bring you up to speed

If your team doesn’t have the skills or capacity to compete with modern startups, team up with a customer experience consultancy with financial services expertise. The right partner’s experience building transformative financial services products will give your enterprise the edge it needs to compete in an ever-changing market. And the best part? The value a specialized team provides in modernizing and creating ideal experiences will far outweigh the cost of engaging them, ensuring you realize the ROI your company needs.