Speed to Market: Building a Mobile Banking App in a Year

Mobile banking is rapidly becoming the norm for managing personal finances. With the market growing at a breakneck speed, software development companies have to deliver high-quality solutions within a short timeframe. At Neontri, we take pride in our ability to meet these demands, as demonstrated through our successful engagement with a cloud-native bank seeking to build a custom mobile banking application. The following case study highlights our approach and the challenges we overcame to provide our client with a feature-rich solution tailored to their goals.

Objective

We were approached by a banking client with ambitious plans to expand into multiple countries. To achieve this goal, they required a high-quality mobile application that would appeal to their target customers and meet the highest quality standards. 

However, this posed two significant challenges. Since the client is a fully digital bank, they did not have an established tech landscape, so we had to build the entire infrastructure from scratch. Secondly, as a solution for a financial institution dealing with sensitive customer data, the mobile application needed robust security measures to handle sensitive documents and personal information in the cloud environment.

Solution

To achieve the desired outcomes, we used our proprietary software solution – Neontri Enterprise Application Framework (NEAF). This comprehensive white-label system provides the essential components needed to create a modern, secure, and feature-rich application.

By leveraging the NEAF, we were able to significantly speed up the entire development process while ensuring top-notch usability. The framework addresses the inherent insecurities of mobile platforms through a tried and tested mobile app architecture, eliminating the need for clients to design and implement security measures from scratch.

NEAF offers a set of libraries and ready-to-use back-end components that can be seamlessly integrated into the mobile application development project. These pre-built features allowed us to bypass repetitive tasks, enabling a more efficient and cost-effective development process.

Cooperation process

Effective collaboration with the client is always based on a structured cooperation process. This helps us understand their requirements and develop a tailored solution that meets their expectations regarding functionality, performance, and user experience.

Workshop

In this initial phase, the client outlined their needs and objectives. Based on their requirements, we defined the project’s scope and deliverables. We then proceeded with a comprehensive analysis, exploring the client’s existing architecture and assessing how our solution could be seamlessly integrated into it.

Team formation

We assembled a mobile app development team with the right mix of skills and expertise to address the project requirements and tackle the challenges ahead. The team included:

• two Android developers;
• two iOS developers;
• three back-end developers;
• three or four analysts;
• a product owner;
• a technical product owner;
• and several testers. 

Architecture development

The team focused on defining the target architecture that served as the foundation for the solution. While our mobile app framework was initially built on C++ for hybrid functionality, the current approach leverages native technologies such as Kotlin for Android and Swift for iOS. This shift enabled us to offer seamless integration with device native capabilities, ensuring optimal performance and adherence to platform-specific guidelines and best practices.

Building core functionality

We developed and implemented essential features and utilities allowing our client to manage their mobile applications and delight their customers with an innovative mobile banking system that offers seamless user experience across multiple platforms. 

Here are some of the features we have integrated:

• Multi-language support so users can engage with the app in their native language.
• Dynamic rich text labels for efficient content management.
• Feature toggle mechanisms to remotely enable or disable specific features. This solution allows developers to safely experiment with new functionality by exposing different feature variations to different user segments through A/B testing.
• Intelligent caching that reduces redundant network requests and improves responsiveness.
• In-app messaging mechanisms for seamless delivery of essential notifications and prompts within the mobile app.

Results

In less than a year, the Neontri team has developed a secure, user-friendly, and easily customizable mobile banking application. We delivered a solution that met the client’s immediate requirements and provided a solid foundation for future growth and adaptation, ensuring a long-lasting and reliable mobile banking experience for their customers. By leveraging the combination of Secure Core, Secure WebView, and the Admin Panel components from the Mobile Banking Framework, we delivered a solution that comprehensively addressed the client’s needs.

SecureCore

SecureCore, our robust security framework, was designed to fortify mobile applications against any potential vulnerabilities and threats, ensuring the highest levels of protection available for mobile applications. This comprehensive security model has several important features that were critical for the project’s success:

• Network communication between the client (app) and the server is secured using mutual TLS protocols, which involve two-way authentication to verify identities on both ends.
• Our security model has its own integrated Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) system to issue and manage digital certificates and encryption keys.
• Multiple techniques are employed to protect sensitive data stored locally on the device, including encrypted persistent storage, secure data wiping, and safe memory management practices.
• The framework incorporates algorithms to verify the integrity of the application code, ensuring it has not been tampered with or modified. It also features anti-debugging measures and code obfuscation to prevent unauthorized individuals from accessing or reverse-engineering the app’s inner workings.
• Security updates and patches are implemented independently from the operating system, ensuring the app’s security does not rely on the user’s device being up-to-date with the latest OS version.

Secure WebView

While platform-specific technologies are the best way to build an enterprise application, our client needed the flexibility of a hybrid application approach. With our WebView module, we were able to strike a balance between deployment speed and security, combining the strengths of native mobile development with the flexibility of web-based components within a single application.

Here are the key features of the WebView that allowed us to achieve these results:

• Hybrid application support enables businesses to run web-based components securely within their native app.
• The WebView component is implemented separately for iOS and Android, addressing potential vulnerabilities and compatibility issues across different versions of these operating systems.
• Certificate pinning for an extra layer of security to ensure that the WebView communicates only with trusted and verified servers.
• WebView supports all HTTP methods, providing full functionality for web-based interactions within the native app.
• JavaScript API facilitates access to native functions and hardware features, enabling seamless integration between the app’s native and web-based parts.

Admin panel

We decided to enhance our mobile app framework with a centralized control center to help our client seamlessly manage and customize the content displayed within their banking application. It streamlines the digital publishing process and helps to tailor the app’s functionality to create an engaging user journey aligned with the bank’s unique branding and service offerings.

The admin panel provides comprehensive control over the entire framework, offering seamless integration of various functionalities. Its key capabilities include:

• Authorized personnel can easily update information, modify layouts, and add new components, ensuring that customers have access to the most up-to-date and relevant content.
• The Admin Panel allows our client to seamlessly incorporate their brand identity, color schemes, and visual elements, creating a consistent and personalized experience across all touchpoints.
• Granular access controls and permission levels ensure that only authorized personnel can make changes to the app’s content and configurations, maintaining data integrity and regulatory compliance.
• Detailed audit logs and version history track all changes made to the app’s content, enabling transparency, accountability, and the ability to roll back changes if necessary.
• The user-friendly interface simplifies the content management process, reducing the learning curve and enabling efficient collaboration among teams responsible for maintaining and updating the banking application.

The end-users can experience a polished and intuitive mobile banking application while the complex architecture consisting of the mobile application and back-end systems remains invisible. This complexity is hidden, thanks to the NEAF’s modular design and our team’s expertise in integrating and optimizing these components.