Must Consider Factors for Mobile Banking and Secure Fintech App Development

Would you rather pay $4 Billion or $200 million? Ask Equifax , a company responsible for exposing the personal information of 150 million customers which cost them heavily because they did not take into consideration some basic and simple factors for mobile banking app development and secure fintech app development .

Mobile Banking Trends & Blunders to Avoid

Before we go on to explore some factors on how we can make sure that we have done everything during our mobile banking app development and secure fintech app development process, let’s look at a few trends in mobile banking development:

Although, there is another statistic that we should look at and work towards improving:

A study by the Clearing House in 2018, found that two-thirds out of 1500 people were extremely worried about their data and privacy while using fintech apps. And their fear is valid as there have been some huge blunders in the past few years. Some major ones are:

• 2017 — Equifax — 143 million accounts in the US
• 2019 — Earl Enterprises — two million credit cards

Factors for Mobile Banking and Secure Fintech App Development

Security is of utmost importance, every step of the way.

Apple Pay popularised the concept of tokenisation, creating one-time codes for payment, in an effort to limit the risk of major data breaches.

In this method, you don’t need to store the debit and credit card numbers for payments. The servers will hold what’s called the token. The entire system then just deals with the token and no one needs to know the underlying billing information.

According to a 2017 report from Pew Research Center , only 52% of American adults use two-factor authentication, and about 25% of them prefer to use simple, non-secure passwords because they feel they may not remember complex passwords.

Make sure to log all user activity. For eg:

While building your mobile banking or fintech app, make sure your app developers keep logs of everything and that these logs need to be easily accessible for a potential ‘post-mortem analysis’ when any incident needs to be reviewed.

In case of actions revolving around large transactions, or change in crucial information, it would be more secure to have a multi-step approval process in place. Sure, the customer may find it a little pain at times, but when it comes to security, you can never be too safe.

Some other must-include features to ensure security while going for your mobile banking development or fintech app development are:

• Do not store any sensitive information on local machines
• Always use SSL for all communications between your mobile banking app or fintech app and its servers
• Implement biometrics or voice recognition
• Automatic log out in case of no user activity for a predefined time
• Have text notifications for all transactions done on the app
  2. Make sure that the Code is Secure

Mobile banking and fintech apps are focussed on money and sensitive data, so there’s absolutely no room for errors. While these apps need to be intuitive and easy to use, they need to be secure.

Some practices that we follow when working on mobile banking app development or for secure fintech app development :

Input validation helps prevent hackers from injecting your app with malicious code, by either sanitizing or rejecting the input. There are many websites and apps that have been hacked just because they lacked input validation.

In case your app needs to send any data to external networks, make sure that it is absolutely necessary and review it to ensure it doesn’t have any sensitive information.

If you want to build a secure fintech app, it’s important to have access controls in place to avoid disclosure and unauthorized use of data.

Get your QA Team to attack your app with SQL injections to test its vulnerability and see how it performs. If you want to have the highest levels of security, make sure your app is impenetrable.

3. Use a Secured Infrastructure

This is for your proxy servers and firewalls. Configure your routers properly to protect against any internal attacks.

Use tools like Microsoft’s Software Update Service and RedHat’s up2date service to regularly maintain and update your operating system.

Leverage services provided by AWS cloud for faster disaster recovery and minimizing the impact of DDoS attacks. Each layer of the technology stack should be prepared for redundancy.

Use HTTPS SSL certificate to keep your user’s data safe and secure. For all our mobile app development, we use it as a de-facto standard to force SSL for any request they serve.

4. Ensure Safety in Everything

ISO 27001 is one of the best information security certifications. We at Systango are ISO 27001 certified which ensures that we follow best practices for security policy, risk assessment, incident management, and more.

5. Test for all Possible Scenarios

Testing is everything.

Test your network — servers, network devices, and DNS.

Test your operating system, the database, storage, and all other components.

Perform client-side penetration testing or internal testing. Basically, check the application while it’s running in the browser and making sure that no breach can occur. Here, you perform JavaScript execution, HTML injection, CSS injection, Clickjacking, and testing local storage. This will help you answer some very important questions such as:

• Are there any vulnerabilities in the system?
• If yes, what and how harm can be done, and how can you prevent it?
• Are the access rights for everyone set correctly?
• Are there any weak points in the system?
• Server Security Testing

For server-side security testing, we help our enterprise clients hire an independent security agency to do a yearly penetration test and comply with all regulations.

6. Use Data Encryption

Encrypting data basically means sending the original data to the right user and meaningless data to hackers or unauthorised users. There are many encryption algorithms available, but we at Systango, use AES ( Advanced Encryption Standard), one of the safest methods for this. Having HTTPs or SSL during transmission of data is not enough, all of your databases need to be protected by data encryption.

According to the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council, financial institutions and banks should encrypt all the following information:

• All personal information that a user gives in order to get a specific service or product (like — name, address, income, social security number)
• All information that can be received from a transaction (like — payment history, credit card purchases, account numbers)
• Information that can be received while providing specific financial service (like — a consumer report)

7. Follow All Laws and Regulations

In mobile banking app development or for a secure fintech app development , there are many financial laws and regulations that you need to follow. These laws differ with countries, and regions, so it’s better to partner with a software development company or hire fintech app developers that are not only familiar with these laws but have built fintech products for other clients in those regions.

EU and EEA countries have mandated companies to follow GDPR guidelines from 2018. This is to ensure data protection and offer transparency on how data processing is done and what done is used or stored. Not complying with the GDPR policy could mean a huge fine and serious legal consequences.

The goal of PIC DSS is to maintain a secure network and protect users’ data by regularly monitoring and testing the system in order to reduce credit card fraud.

The European Commission adopted this proposal and enforced it from 14 September 2019. The aim is to create a safer, more innovative payment ecosystem across the entire continent, make cross-border financial operations easier, and support online payment initiatives, like open banking.

8. Level up with Next-Gen Technologies

Voice-processing systems and digital assistants (chatbots) are now possible. These next-gen technologies also help in detecting any vulnerabilities and anomalies that would be untraceable for a human and help in taking security to the next level.

Systango and Secure Fintech App Development

Many banks, startups, and hedge funds like Deloitte, Ransquawk, Taxshield, ATSC, Balboa Capital trust us for our deep understanding of all things FinTech.

Futurebricks

We built a P2P lending infrastructure for small and medium-sized real estate development projects for our client Futurebricks , who are authorised, and regulated by the FCA, UK.

We helped them launch their P2P Lending web app within a short span of 3 months including successful pen testing!

is a budgeting, personal finance aggregator and monitor app that allows its users to calculate their net-worth and monitor investments across multiple geographies. We were chosen by the Fintify team for our domain and technology expertise both.

Systango — We Are The Tech in FinTech

Always find a technology partner that will help you add real value to your business. If you need a specialised team with not just technical expertise but with business domain knowledge, Systango is the team for you. Our fintech app developers help you build a safe, secure, and flawless user experience for your customers. Get in touch to know more!

Originally published at https://www.systango.com on July 7, 2020