How Fintech Companies Can Harness Crowd-Testing to Gain a Competitive Edge in The Investment App Market in 2024

As the Deloitte report suggests, in the year 2024, and years to come, the market for investment apps will be highly dynamic and competitive. These applications play a vital role in helping individuals manage their investments. However, as more companies enter this market, competition intensifies.

To distinguish themselves, fintech companies, which specialize in financial technology, are seeking innovative strategies. One such strategy gaining prominence is the utilization of crowd-testing. This approach involves enlisting the assistance of numerous individuals from diverse backgrounds to rigorously evaluate investment apps. They provide valuable feedback and identify areas for improvement and enhancement.

Challenges Faced by Fintech Companies in This Market

In order to adapt to the fiercely competitive market, fintech companies are increasingly focusing on enhancing their User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) design, as well as upgrading their reporting and analysis tools. Here’s a breakdown of these challenges and strategies:

UX/UI Design

Good UX/UI design is characterized by a clean, intuitive interface that reduces the cognitive load on the users, making the platform easy to navigate and the information easy to digest​​.

User Retention

Keeping users engaged is a significant challenge in fintech. Low retention equates to fewer users and, subsequently, reduced income. By enhancing the user experience, for instance, through gamification and reward systems, fintech companies can increase user retention​.

Funds transactions and processing 

The challenge of testing funds transactions in the fintech investment app market encompasses a multifaceted landscape, including the need to validate deposits, withdrawals, and various payment methods. With the proliferation of eWallet vendors and diverse user preferences, ensuring a seamless funds processing flow presents a significant challenge for fintech companies.

Reporting and Analysis Tools

Fintech companies grapple with the validation of data quality, a crucial step for accurate reporting. Crafting tailored reports with visualizations like charts and graphs is challenging but necessary for user-friendly analytics. The key to advancing these tools lies in persistent refinement, guided by ongoing user consultation and user feedback, to ensure they meet the evolving demands of the market.

9 Must-Have Features for Fintech Products that Should be Tested

User Interface and User Experience (UI/UX)

A fintech product’s success is heavily reliant on its UI/UX as it directly impacts customer satisfaction and engagement. When testing, make sure the interface is intuitive, accessible, and aesthetically pleasing, facilitating a frictionless journey for the user. Key aspects to focus on include simplicity of navigation, clarity of information presentation, responsiveness of design across different devices, and the efficiency of task completion flows. It’s essential to validate that users can accomplish their financial activities with confidence and ease, which in turn promotes trust and loyalty to the fintech service.

Compatibility and Integration

Compatibility and integration testing are vital for fintech products, which must work flawlessly across a range of devices, operating systems, and third-party financial services. Crowd-testing plays a pivotal role here, exposing the product to diverse user environments to detect inconsistencies in device performance, operating system compatibility, and hardware interactions. It also tests the seamless connection with external services, verifying that integrations are reliable and user data flows smoothly between systems, which is crucial for maintaining a high-quality user experience.

Investing (Funding and Withdrawals)

The functionality for buying, selling, and trading in stocks, NFTs, and cryptocurrencies needs to be validated meticulously. Real-time updates on investments, including funds’ inflow and outflow, should be accurate and timely to keep investors informed.

Payment Processing

Test payment processing features, including bill payments, money transfers, and payment card integration, to ensure secure transactions, accurate processing, and fraud prevention mechanisms.

Resources

Testing the accessibility and responsiveness of digital investing managers and other experts who provide online help is essential. Additionally, the availability and accuracy of resource materials, tools, and expert advice need verification to ensure they meet the user’s needs.

Multi-User Collaboration

Real-time collaboration features among investors, financial advisors, and other stakeholders within the app should be tested. This includes evaluating communication channels, shared views, and real-time updates. Proper access control and permissions are necessary to safeguard sensitive information while promoting collaboration.

Account Management

Extensive testing should cover:

• profile creation, authentication, and authorization, and making sure unauthorized access is prevented. 
• document upload, 
• bank linking, 
• data accuracy checks including balance checks, transaction history, and fund transfers. 

Ensuring the integrity of user data across all platforms and secure data migration where necessary is vital to build trust with users.

Speed

Speed is of the essence in the fintech world. The transaction speed, especially leveraging existing P2P and ACH networks to complete transactions quickly, needs thorough testing. Providing instant or near-instant asset availability can significantly improve user satisfaction and trust in the platform.

Security

Security is non-negotiable in fintech. A secure yet unintrusive identity verification process, including two-factor or biometric authentication, should be tested rigorously. Fraud protection measures need to be robust to protect both the users and the platform from malicious activities.

Importance of Embracing Crowd-Testing to Gain a Competitive Edge for Fintech Companies

Crowd-testing involves leveraging a diverse group of external testers to evaluate fintech applications under real-world conditions, offering a broader testing scope compared to traditional methods. The main advantages include:

• Diverse Pool of Testers: Reflects a wide user spectrum, providing varied feedback in different geographies and diversity of background, knowledge, and expertise. 
• Diversity of Devices and OS: Guarantees the app functions well across different technologies, hardware configurations, carriers, OS versions, etc.
• Real-World Testing Scenarios: Provides insights into how the app performs in actual user conditions, under real-world scenarios. 
• Testing KYC and Financial Transactions: Crowd-testing offers fintech companies the unique advantage of using real crowd testers to rigorously test and validate know your customer (KYC) processes, payment systems, and various financial transactions. 
• Speed: Accelerates the testing process with parallel testing.
• Parallel Testing: Multiple test cases are executed simultaneously, saving time.
• Cost-Effectiveness: Reduces the need for significant investment in in-house testing resources, or purchasing own devices. 

Best Practices for Crowd-Testing in The Investment App Market

Navigating the investment app market requires a meticulous approach to testing to ensure optimal functionality and user satisfaction. Here’s a roadmap for employing crowd-testing effectively in this domain:

Planning

1. Kickstart with a well-documented test plan detailing the scope, objectives, timelines, and resources required. It should outline the key functionalities, platforms, and devices to be tested.
2. Establish a robust test environment replicating real-world scenarios as closely as possible to glean accurate insights.
3. Arrange for realistic test data that closely mirrors actual user data to ensure meaningful testing outcomes.
4. Craft detailed test cases covering all possible scenarios and confirm they are executed meticulously by the crowd.

Execution

1. Evaluate the core functionalities of the app, like making investments, viewing portfolios, and withdrawing funds, to confirm they work seamlessly.
2. Assess the app’s performance under various conditions to ensure it remains responsive even during peak usage times.
3. Prioritize security to protect sensitive financial data, guarantee compliance with regulatory standards, and employ stringent authentication measures.
4. Foster a culture of continuous testing integrated within the development lifecycle to catch issues early and ensure a market-ready product.
5. Evaluate the app’s user interface, ease of navigation, and overall user satisfaction to provide a positive user experience.
6. Verify the app’s localization features across languages, currencies, date formats, and regional compliance requirements to cater to a global audience.
7. Thoroughly test the payment gateway and trading functionalities, including the process of refilling the wallet, making investments, and executing withdrawals to ensure a seamless user experience.

Test Reporting and Documentation

A robust reporting system is key to tracking the progress and outcomes of crowd-testing. While documenting bugs and enhancements is crucial, it shouldn’t overburden the client. 

Crowd-testing companies offer managed services to alleviate this pressure. They assign a dedicated project manager who serves as the primary point of contact, guiding the client through each step. This manager ensures that all documentation is comprehensive yet concise, and they facilitate communication so that the results are clear and actionable for all stakeholders. This makes engaging with crowd-testing a seamless and advantageous process for clients.

Bottom Line

A big part of winning the fintech race is making sure apps work well, are easy to use, and keep users’ data safe. Crowd-testing is a smart way to achieve these goals by having a large and varied group of people test the apps in real-life situations, which is something traditional testing can miss.

Here’s a quick recap of what crowd-testing brings to the table:

• Varied Opinions: With crowd-testing, you get many different people to test your app. This is great as they can spot problems that a smaller group might miss.
• Testing on Different Gadgets: People have all sorts of phones and tablets. Crowd-testing helps ensure your app works well on all these different gadgets.
• Real-life Testing: It tests your app in real-life situations, giving you a better idea of how ready it is for the market. Especially the most challenging parts of the KYC process, payments, and other financial transactions. 
• Quick and Efficient: Many testers can work at the same time on different parts of the app, finding bugs faster.
• Easy on the Pocket: It’s a cost-friendly way to test your app without needing a big in-house team.

Moreover, good planning, carrying out the tests, and keeping clear records, as outlined in the best practices, are key steps to make the most out of crowd-testing.

In an industry where earning and keeping the trust of users is crucial, crowd-testing can be a game-changer for fintech companies. It helps in fine-tuning the apps and gaining a lead in the competitive market. By choosing crowd-testing, fintech companies stand a better chance to meet the high standards and complex rules of the financial world while keeping users happy.

Ubertetsers is a leading global crowd testing company, for more information please contact us at sales@ubertesters.com