Building and providing high-quality products and services is crucial for any fintech company. With millions of dollars being transacted daily, ensuring that your systems are reliable, secure, and user-friendly is paramount. In this article, we will explore the role of quality and trust in fintech, discuss existing quality-improving methodologies, and introduce the Maxcode Tech Audit as a tool for fintech companies to elevate their businesses.
The Importance of Quality and Trust in Fintech
The first step is to acknowledge there is more to a product than making sure it is functional as per requests, user-friendly and has no defects. To turn your company into a reputable provider that clients trust you must build software the right way. That is, the right way for you and your client’s needs, as there is no silver bullet for delivering a successful product.
And building a strong fintech product means gaining and maintaining customer trust, enhancing operational efficiency, ensuring compliance with regulations (such as AML and KYC), as well as identifying any cybersecurity threats. Making sure all these systems are working efficiently and effectively. In a nutshell, that quality is present.
Quality-Improving Methodologies in Fintech
If you are a fintech company looking to reach the next level, you may want to see what low-hanging fruit you’re missing out on when it comes to the quality of your software. Quality has been an important factor ever since the industrial revolution, so it will not be a surprise to mention there already are several quality-improving methods out there.
For instance, Six Sigma is a methodology aimed at reducing the differences that occur in a product or service (minimizing variability) and increasing the overall efficiency and effectiveness of a process. This is achieved through defining, measuring, analyzing and controlling processes to reach a high-quality level.
Another well-known quality management system is the ISO:9001 standard. It provides a framework for organizations to establish processes for quality control, quality assurance, and continuous improvement. The standard covers areas such as leadership, planning, customer focus, risk management, and measurement and analysis.
However, as you can probably imagine, while highly relevant and impactful, these two systems are also complex affairs, requiring a significant amount of work just to understand them. At the same time, being agnostic enough to be applied to many industries makes them sometimes difficult to steer them in the software development direction.
Introducing the Maxcode Tech Audit
Throughout our experience of building and delivering software engineering over the years, we have seen a plethora of working contexts, some of which can be construed as patterns, others as antipatterns. At the same time, we’ve been in the driving seat for multiple projects, working on overhauling their development process, to achieve better time-to-market, higher reliability, increased security and improved usability. These key experiences have led to us taking the time in 2019 to shape what we now call our Tech Audit.
The Tech Audit is an in-house mechanism we have designed (and tested internally) to make sure we are using the right processes, tools and systems to build and deliver top-notch products to our clients.
When we started working on this approach to quality in 2019, we aimed to create a system that would be dedicated to the software development industry, easy to use, but that would also produce relevant results, in a shorter timeframe. What came out of this effort is a holistic process, which helps tech companies by reducing their time-to-market, while increasing reliability and security. The process is quite simple, being comprised of just two steps – the Audit and the Analysis Report.
To fully understand the strengths and weaknesses of a software project, we created a list of over 100 criteria, grouped into 5 distinct categories – Process, Development, Testing, Operability and Data Security.
Each criterion describes a key point in the software development lifecycle and has a weighted value, allowing us to adapt its impact in improving the quality, as the industry involves. The heart of our Tech Audit process is a series of sessions that our quality engineers facilitate while going through your software product’s entire development lifecycle. They start by checking for basic things such as how documentation is organized and then go into detail on specific things such as access to live production data. In the end, they create a report that results in a quality percentage, describing how much potential there is for improvement. But that’s not all.
While highlighting the key actionable areas in the software development lifecycle is an important step towards improving the reliability of your product, it’s only half the picture. As part of our Tech Audit, we take the lower-rated criteria from the Tech Audit and, based on the specific context your project is in, we create a shortlist of impactful recommendations. To make them easily actionable, we describe what would be the best approach to put them into practice. At the same time, we classify these improvements from two perspectives – their impact in reducing the time-to-market and in increasing the reliability of the software development process.
Improving quality and trust in fintech is crucial for success in a highly competitive market. The Maxcode Tech Audit provides a simple yet effective tool for fintech companies to understand the status of their projects and create custom approaches for building better high performant products. By ensuring that the right processes and tools are being used, businesses can increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, reduce waste, and improve their reputation in the market.
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Contact us to learn more about the Maxcode tech audit, and to sign up for the opportunity to perform this audit on your product
