6 Approaches to Secure Sustainable Growth for your Fintech Platform

The fintech landscape is evolving at an exceptional pace, with more advanced products and services emerging each year. 

For businesses that have launched fintech platforms and apps, it can be a difficult balancing act to keep in touch with an ever-growing industry while securing sustainable growth within their own platform. 

However, there are a number of measures that can be taken to ensure that finance technology platforms have all the tools available to them in order to grow organically and reach new audiences even in spite of the highly competitive landscape that surrounds the industry. 

With this in mind, let’s take a look at six approaches companies can take in securing sustainable growth for their fintech platform:

1. Make Sure Your Platform is Ready to Support Your Ambitions

This applies to just about every business in just about every industry. Before you can consider leveraging growth for your platform, you must first take a moment to look at your product and ask yourself some questions about preparedness. 

When it comes to scaling businesses, it’s not just about growing your ambitions, you must also consider whether your platform can adapt to a larger workload without impacting its overall performance. 

If you’re not yet ready to grow your product, it could lead to more problems that may eat into your existing revenue. Additionally, if your market isn’t there, the act of paying to expand your reach could also hinder your bottom line.

2. Calibrate Your Roadmap

When anticipating growth in the world of fintech, it’s essential to manage expectations between building a leading product and managing its time to market. 

Here, it’s important to remember that it’s not just your platform that needs to be scalable in order to secure growth. Your entire business model must follow suit–from your organization, technological infrastructure, to your compliance, and personnel. This poses questions regarding your priorities in terms of your rate of growth and the skills that your team needs to take on in order to secure sustainable scaling of your platform. 

While you might be itching to level up your growth, it takes time to build a scalable infrastructure. This means that building a sensible roadmap that incorporates your vision for the future and the degree of skill required expand in a sustainable manner. 

(Image: LinkedIn)

As the diagram above illustrates, exponential growth can only be achieved when your business has established its market fit and worked to optimize the right channels.

3. Prioritize Trust

Trustworthy brands aren’t built overnight–particularly when it comes to the world of fintech and open banking. 

When developing a fintech platform, it’s likely that open banking will be integral to your product–providing the advanced services that are central to your service. Open banking is generally centered around utilizing a third party to securely access financial data from a bank with the user’s consent. It will then extract the data and use it to provide personalized financial services. This consent can be given and withdrawn at any time, and in a landscape governed by GDPR, this aspect of privacy is a big consideration for all parties. 

To grow your fintech, you’ll invariably need to secure consent to access the financial data of your users. This means that gaining permission for access to financial data is a central point of a fintech’s scaling strategy. 

One of the most vital ways of securing this consent is to build trust in your platform as a priority. For example, generating a user-friendly terms and conditions or privacy policy can bring greater levels of trust in a product.

4. Never Skimp on Security

If you’re looking to grow your fintech firm, the key area that you should be looking to ramp up spending in is security. Keeping the personal data of your customers safe should be a major priority for every fintech startup, and there should never be any risk of oversight when it comes to matters of security, compliance, and regulation policies throughout all areas of operation. 

Growth can depend on spending money across the board on upgrading infrastructure and readiness, but no level of expenditure can repair the reputational damage that a firm can suffer from experiencing a security breach. 

Although this may seem like it involves a lot of spending on a less-than-glamorous aspect of your fintech platform, security measures can actually be highly marketable as a key feature of your company. 

Although it may weigh in as a significant expense to scale, significant safety protocols can be a tool for securing more growth and attracting more clients willing to trust you with their finances.

5. Monetize Expertise

Although we’ve discussed the fact that scaling can be a costly process, the act of securing growth can also open the door to new revenue streams.

Because trust is an essential component of opening a fintech platform to new customers, it means that expertise can not only be shared but also monetized. By building industry-specific online learning resources, you can leverage premium-quality content in the form of PDF downloads, subscription-based podcasts, and video-based learning. 

The beauty of monetizing your industry expertise is that it can not only bolster your range of content for visitors, but it can also improve your reputation as a thought-leader and expert in your field. 

There are many ways in which you can include a monetized course within your fintech platform, including:

• Specializing in a particular topic or niche

• Building a new website or incorporating your learning content into your current site

• Uploading and promoting expert content

Furthermore, setting up premium learning resources in an industry like fintech can pave the way for greater profits due to your revenues only being limited by your traffic flows.

6. Anticipate What’s Next for Your Platform

It’s not enough to set out your roadmap for growth and to consider the primary factors that will come into the mix as you expand your platform. You’ll also need to keep in mind all the factors that will influence your growth. 

Consider exactly how your business is set to scale, the new products you’ll develop, the fresh geographical regions you’ll branch into, and what further interactions will be essential in implementing your new systems and the vendors that can enable you to continue your growth. 

By taking the time to fully understand your expected growth rates and the markets that you’ll enter as a result, you can be more aware of the funds you’ll need to bring your product to market and whether you can afford to grow in the way that you’re anticipating. 

In getting the above approaches right, you’ll not only ensure that your product comes to market, but you can safeguard against a prospective cul-de-sac with your platform that could inhibit further expansion later down the line. 

Fintech may be a complex and unpredictable industry, but that shouldn’t stop you from growing your product in a sustainable manner as and when it makes sense to take the next step for yourself and your fintech platform.