How to Develop a Banking Website or Web App

Interested in how to build a banking site now? Hold the line — we’ll show you how.

💳 Bank Website vs. Banking Web App: What’s the Difference?

Usually, when people hear the word website, they instantly think that this term covers every web-based platform. However, it’s not true.

Many “websites” should be considered as web apps due to several reasons.

But before that, let’s dot the i's and cross the t's with the terminology part.

Without getting into tech details, a website is simply the collection of content. It can be texts, videos, audios, pictures, and so on.

Most of us attend fintech websites and consume information there. To help our future selves let’s take a look at one of the biggest US bank websites.

Of course, you can organize your online projects in any form you want since both websites and web apps are intended to improve the user experience.

But remember, depending on the purpose you pursue, the website or web app may fit your business needs better.

🔝 Top Things to Pay Attention to During Bank Website Development

In this section, we’ll present a couple of things worth attention when creating a banking website or web app.

Intuitive and user-friendly design 😊

When starting a fintech company online, dedicate some time to study the best bank website design solutions on the market.

Well, one answer can’t be suitable for everybody, but it has to be intuitive and user-friendly for sure.

I think we all know the situation when we can’t find the information we need on the website, spend quite a while there, and then just leave — irritated, without getting what we wanted to.

To prevent this customer outflow, the web app should:

• Be based on navigation patterns familiar to your users — intuitive.
• Have all features accessible at one-two clicks.
• Offer personalization and customization options (mobile version, mode for visually impaired, customized avatar, e-mailing, etc.).
• Conduct all transactions quickly, without delays.

If you want to get a clearer picture of what the design could be, you can look for banking websites designs on the Internet and research your competitors’ designs.

Device Differences 💻

It’s quite obvious that different people may use different devices to use your services, isn’t it? So why don’t we take that into account and create a banking web app that’s optimized for PC, tablets, and phones.

Besides, not only the devices matter. The browser, the operating system, and its version, screen size, etc. — all of it should be considered.

You can make sure that your platform is optimized for each case by:

• Running pre-tests on different simulations. Additionally, you can test the security and intuitivity of the use.
• Gathering metrics, running surveys, and collecting feedback on user experience for the analysis.

It’s important since you might lose potential customers if the web app won’t be optimized for their devices, browsers, OS, etc. The optimization works rather attractive for the client — impeccable website work means satisfied customers.

✅ Top Features of A Banking Web App

In this section, we’ll review basic and extra features that you can add to create a banking web app that’s functional, useful, and brings value to customers.

# 1: Sign Up & Profiles 🔒

The Sign Up stage is quite a tricky one.

On the one hand, you can’t ask for too much information so that the process won’t be repulsive for users.

On the other hand, this is where you can implement many security features to create multiple layers of it (password, additional personal questions, phone number, and email confirmation, etc.).

And it’s quite a challenge to strike the balance. At the end of the day, nobody wants their data to be stolen, thus, you can add as many security features as it’s needed to create a reliable barrier between frauds and users’ data.

If there’s no such feature, the user experience can be damaged — a person in a hurry couldn’t find the right ATM and was late to work, for instance.

To prevent these little inconveniences and don’t repel clients, a map is worth considering.

We’d like to give you a bit of general advice based on this situation:

Try to predict the situation, analyze what customers might need, show that you care — it’s the key to success!

You can make your map even more useful by adding a real-time queue counter, mark ATMs a customer uses most often, show if an ATM doesn’t have a certain banknote (“$10 ran out”, for instance) and so on.

# 6: Customer Support 📣

Customer support in banking organizations should be flawless.

No matter how well your web app is developed, little trouble and misunderstandings will most likely occur. The faster you solve them, the better users will think of you as their service provider.

So, support service should:

• Provide a chatbot (artificial intelligence programmed to solve simple troubles and deal with questions) and live chats.
• Be quick.
• Have a wide range of answers listed in the FAQ.
• Offer 24/7 phone support for an emergency.
• Provide a list of contacts, including email, various phone numbers from different operators, etc.

Nowadays many banks provide support via popular messengers like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Viber, Telegram. Normally, users are redirected from the web app to the messenger.

📖 Top Features of A Banking Website

In this section, we’ll review the basic features and information a banking website should have.

Basically, it’s not much to talk about since the more information you provide, the more value your website brings.

However, there are some points we’d like to highlight.

So, your banking website can contain:

• Cards opportunities.

You can place the information about what cards you offer, what are the terms, bonuses from the cards if there are any.

Moreover, it should be easy to spot and stand out compared to the main text. You can make it of different color, put in a geometric figure, etc.

Short Forms

Since it’s the banking web app, there probably will be many forms to fill in.

Thus, try to keep it as short as possible.

It’s much harder to type on the phone — customers can be on their way to somewhere, T9 always corrects the words — it’s just not convenient.

So, to make an email subscription you only need an email and maybe name. No phone numbers, questions like “How did you find out about us” — only essential information.

Long forms with too many additional questions may be rather repellent for customers.

Frameworks

There are a bunch of free and paid frameworks that can help you scale your website to any device.

Bootstrap is one of the most popular ones. It’s a front-end framework designed by Twitter to adapt websites to mobile devices quickly. It’s pre-built which frees you from having to code it yourself or with TechPartner.

However, it also means that you’ll be limited by what the pre-built framework offers. Moreover, if you use such, you’d have to check if it’s suitable for the goal you want to reach with this framework.

Simple & Responsive Design

If you want to be mobile-friendly, a simple and practical bank web app design might help you with this. Complex designs can make the website load slowly on mobiles which can be repellent.

It also helps to centralize the attention while a complicated fintech website design may be a bit confusing and work inversely.

When simple design is quite an understandable meaning, responsive needs to be explained. So, a responsive banking websites designs:

• Adjust a website to any screen sizes and browsers.
• Offer better readability (with help of automatically changeable fonts and colors for different devices).
• Detect multiple screen resolutions.

💡 Takeaways

As you can see, there are quite a few aspects you should consider to start a fintech company online.

Let’s sum up the main steps: