With investing-related apps currently dominating the market, more and more brokerage firms, investment companies, and fintech consulting organizations are making a move to online platforms.
This rise in investment apps has resulted in an increase in stock trading in the United States, Australia, and Europe, as firms worldwide compete for customers by providing a fresh way to profit from their current savings.
In fact, Internet searches for penny stock trading and other investment apps have grown at an annual rate of 115 percent. A heightened interest in stock trading, coupled with the shocking realization that 69 percent of Americans have less than $1,000 in savings, has caused the investment app market to become increasingly popular in recent years.
However, to create an investment app that is successful, you must carefully consider several variables, including its necessary features, marketing strategies, and your target audience. Keep reading to learn more.
What You’ll Learn In This Post
- What Is An Investment App?
- Investment App Market Trends
- Why Are Investment Apps Popular?
- Top 3 Investment Apps
- Popular Features of an Investment App
- 6 Steps to Build an Investment App
- Marketing Considerations
- Monetization
- Idea Maker’s Experience In Real Estate
- Frequently Asked Questions
Table of Contents
What is an investment app?
An investment app is a program made to enable trading or investing using only your smartphone or tablet. These apps contain information for all investors or only one particular business and come in two types: HTML5 investor apps and native investor apps.
Most investor apps give users access to information about publicly traded companies, including stock quotations, corporate documents, fact sheets, presentations, and marketing materials, which can often be shared via email and social media.
Investor apps became more widespread in 2011 with the addition of new investor app developers. As more businesses are anticipated to follow this path, mobile apps for investor communications appear to be a growing trend.
By the end of 2012, over 116 million.
Investment App Market Trends
Investment apps have significantly increased the market for international investors by providing a simple process to invest at low volumes and cheap costs. Investors now have access to trade on international markets for the first time, thanks to user-friendly trading apps and cheaper trading expenses.
There has also been an increase in the number of individuals utilizing these apps – from 35.6 million in 2017 to over 150 million in 2021.
Why are investment apps popular?
Investment apps are gaining users because of the many benefits available through these platforms.
Below are the top reasons why the popularity of these applications is rising:
Accessibility
Accessibility is essential for everything. Traditional investing is expensive and complicated, and they lack direct access to a stock trading platform. Most individual investors directly choose to deal with banks and brokers.
However, this has been permanently altered by the growth of personal investment apps, as individuals can now invest directly in stocks and other assets on international marketplaces.
Now, anyone can immediately trade stocks online by utilizing investing apps with integrated payments that make transactions quick and simple.
While investors have access to more information than ever, it is their responsibility to make wise decisions. Today’s investors use their trading and personal finance applications for longer-term investing ideas.
Low-Cost Investment
Users get trading access through zero-commission money management apps 24 hours a day and seven days a week, as financial restrictions on participation in the stock market have been lifted.
Even big, established platforms like Charles Schwab and Robinhood have cut costs to stay competitive. Additionally, investors are not constrained by the high share prices of businesses – t are eager to participate.
Convenient Payments
Investors anticipate being able to transact in their currency, make payments using their chosen ways, and have their profits available in their accounts right away. These alternatives must be offered for trading and investment apps that want to serve worldwide markets. By not doing this, they risk missing out on significant portions of the global market.
Trading applications have taken notice, and the industry leaders are making sure their fintech offers a smooth user experience by pre-funding and fronting money to investor accounts to get funds fast and making it just as simple for them to get cash out too.
Top 3 Investment Apps
Before creating an investment app, it is important to know the available top-rated investing apps. This helps you understand what an investment app should look like and how to plan and build one properly.
Here are the top three investment apps you should know:
1. Wealthfront
The best trading platform for beginners, Wealthfront has 490,000 subscribers and manages $27 billion in assets, making it the top pick for goal planning and investment apps overall.
More than 200 ETFs are available through Wealthfront, which consumers can use to create new ETF portfolios or supplement their current ones. No matter what investments you make, the organization will manage and rebalance them on your behalf.
2. Robinhood
Due to its no-fee business strategy and slick, user-friendly trading interface, Robinhood has become a well-known brand among tech-savvy investors and new traders since it first disrupted the brokerage market.
The website makes it simple for users to trade stocks, ETFs, and cryptocurrencies; however, it still needs the comprehensive financial tools, asset classes, and research skills experienced traders need in a broker.
3. Charles Schwab
For investors, employers, and independent advisers, Charles Schwab, one of the biggest discount brokerages in the world, offers a broad range of services. As of September 2022, Charles Schwab had $7.13 trillion in client assets and was still expanding thanks to the October 2020 acquisition of TD Ameritrade.
For investors of all experience levels, Schwab provides a wealth of instructional resources. The company has substantially expanded the range of products and tools for traders and ESG investors.
Popular Features of an Investment App
An investment App should have specific features for it to succeed. These popular features are essential in providing the best trading platform for beginners.
Investment Portfolio
Being an obvious component, portfolios require unique features for access within an organization. You can monitor any number of portfolios, each of which may contain many sub-portfolios. You will require hierarchical portfolios when you want to structure your investments across different accounts.
The ability to display the graphs on any portfolio or sub-portfolio and generate reports based on them is another enhancement to this capability. For investment advisors to keep track of the investments made on behalf of numerous clients, the hierarchical portfolio and its characteristics are of the utmost value. Thus, it serves as a subordinate for applications involving investment management.
Stock Exchange Options
Exchange-traded options offer several advantages. Stock exchange options draw and accommodate more traders since they have uniform strike prices, expiration dates, and deliverables (the number of shares or contracts of the underlying asset).
The user should be able to choose which stock exchange they trade on; for example, FTSE or NASDAQ.
Traders profit from the higher volume since it improves liquidity and lowers expenses. The bid-ask spread gets narrower as there are more traders for a given options contract, making it simpler for interested buyers to find willing sellers.
Payment Options
If users cannot finance their trading accounts, they are meaningless. Therefore, you should offer a variety of methods for transferring money into the app.
Convenience is the main factor in this. A terrific user experience is made possible by reducing as much friction as possible during the funding process.
The best approach is to link the app to the user’s bank account. Thanks to this payment options feature, they can transfer money with the fewest possible steps. You don’t have to worry about integration for every bank.
You should also provide other funding sources like credit cards and internet platforms, such as PayPal, Stripe, or Payoneer, in addition to connecting bank accounts. If that option is unavailable in your location, consider also connecting with mobile wallets if you are providing cryptocurrency.
Implementing as many payment options as possible is the simplest and most economical way to ensure you reach the largest audience.
Customer Service Options
The customer service option is a very important aspect. The user should have easy and fast access to customer service. This should be available to the user 24 hours a day and seven days a week.
A chatbot and live customer support option should be available on the site. They should also have the option to contact customer care through a phone call, email report, or ticket submission.
You should consider ways for users to contact you if they have inquiries. So, consider adding a chatbot, a callback feature, or a 24/7 support staff.
6 Steps to Build an Investment App
Now that you have understood what investment apps are, it is time to know the steps involved to help you successfully create an investment app. Here is a guide to help you build apps similar to Robinhood and other great investment apps.
1. Determine Niché
A market niche is just a section of the market based on characteristics that its users – or consumers – share. The more specialized a niche is, you will often find fewer consumers. The key is to find the ideal balance between the number of consumers and the degree of market niche uniqueness.
If you choose to launch your investment app in a highly specialized industry with few consumers, it would probably be difficult for you to get a return on your investment.
There are different niches in the investment app industry that the top-rated investing apps are in, including:
- Exchange-Traded Funds Apps
- DIY Investment Apps
- Robo-Advisor Apps
- Hybrid Apps
Exchange-Traded Funds Apps
Because it is exchanged on an exchange like stocks are, an ETF is also known as an exchange-traded fund. As shares of an ETF are purchased and sold on the market throughout the trading day, the price of the shares will fluctuate.
In comparison to mutual funds, which only trade once daily after the markets close and are not traded on an exchange, ETFs are typically cheaper and more liquid.
DIY Investment Apps
Both expert and novice investors can use DIY investment programs, which enable users to make investments while on the go. While some DIY investment applications have straightforward user interfaces and only provide basic information about market changes, others offer more sophisticated capabilities geared toward experts.
Because DIY personal investment applications don’t provide consultations or guidance, users must have a strong understanding of investing or be willing to take a risk.
For instance, the bitcoin trading software Binance offers two user interfaces: one for quick and simple investing and the other for more complex use.
Robo-Advisor Apps
Robo-advisor apps offer user instructions, and employ algorithms and AI to forecast future market movements by examining previous data. Since they consider user preferences and behavior to provide better-investing recommendations, these applications are more individualized than DIY apps.
Robo-advisory companies typically produce these apps.
Hybrid Apps
Any investing style is possible with hybrid programs because they combine robo-advising with DIY investing. One application is M1 Finance, which allows users to leverage technology to make decisions based on their knowledge and manage their portfolios independently.
With M1 Finance, inexperienced customers won’t waste time worrying about managing their assets or balancing their portfolios because the robo-advisor will take care of it for them. But with DIY functionality, more experienced investors can take risks and improve their chances of success.
2. Conceptualize Functionality
The features and expectations of the target audience are major things to consider when you create an investment app.
Individual Accounts
An investing platform should be created as a feature-rich piece of software that allows users to easily track earnings and performance and periodically analyze and modify their portfolio.
Management Of Transactions
Customers should also be able to conduct transactions and make investments utilizing your stock market investment app’s user-friendly facilities.
Dashboards For Analytics
Your clients may get the insights they need to make decisions by using a dashboard that will automatically provide information in a user-friendly way.
Real-Time Notifications
Giving consumers access to personalized push notifications, reminders, and instant alerts is crucial. By doing so, you can inform your customers about the state of the stock market, investment returns, unusual behavior, special deals, and discounts.
3. Design Investment App
The users’ knowledge of investments and the significance of particular formulas, fields, or forms may be limited. The investment app should give them enough guidance to make onboarding easier, but don’t bombard them with pop-ups.
Don’t forget that statistics and summaries are also displayed on broad table sheets. Therefore, regardless of screen size, ensure that users can scale and browse enormous volumes of data in an equitable manner.
The design of the investment app should be based on the functionality and branding of your company, as understanding user interface and user experience is essential to design the best app.
4. Develop Investment App
Professionals should do the development of the investment app if you do not have the required skills needed to develop a successful and fully functional investment application.
In this step, you will need to ensure that the app’s architecture is reliable, secure, and able to process and display massive amounts of data in real-time.
Fortunately, there are some APIs available to assist you in creating a mobile investment app:
- E*TRADE offers the ability to control user account data, get option chains, look up exchanges, get quotes, and control orders
- Data on more than 170,000 tickers, gathered from 70 international exchanges, including the Nasdaq and NYSE, is provided by Marketstack
- Real-time, delayed, intraday, historical, and option pricing are all unlocked by Intrinio
5. Test App
Testing is a crucial part of the investment app-building process. The app must be free of bugs at the time of release. The quality assessment engineers will handle that. The app should undergo rigorous testing to ensure it is bug-free.
Depending on the project’s needs, they either test the code as it is being created or periodically during the software development life cycle. Proper quality control will help you polish the software, test its functionality on various devices, set up the servers, and get it ready for release. Then it is tested once more in a real-world setting.
6. Deliver and Refine App
This is the final stage of creating an investment app. This is when the app will be available to users in app stores.
The app should be closely monitored to fix bugs swiftly and refine the app following the user feedback made available by users of the investment application.
Investment App Development Cost
Although there isn’t a perfect investment app cost calculator, you can always figure it out using the following straightforward formula:
Investment app development costs are calculated by multiplying the total time spent on the project by the developer’s hourly rate.
Mobile app development costs are difficult to estimate unless you have discussed your idea with experts. The price is influenced by many variables, such as the number of features, the type of program (native or cross-platform), and deadlines. Costs might be as high as $150,000 or as little as $15,000.
Platform Support
The app’s setup and management are entirely your software provider’s technical responsibility. Therefore, you won’t need to worry about a lag-free operation. To satisfy your company’s needs, you must apply the proper settings and add pertinent material yourself.
If you have a limited budget, it would be best to settle for cross-platform development, as native development is a bit more costly.
Functionality
An app developer begins the creation of investment apps by examining business requirements, outlining the objectives and functionality, and gathering client specifications.
The more functions the app is meant to perform, the more expensive it will be.
Building an MVP
The solution to developing novel products is an MVP. A common launch method that has been extremely successful for household companies, such as Dropbox, Figma, and Uber, developing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) consists of initially implementing core, basic features and then building up functionality over time.
Make an MVP first, rather than rushing to code the next big thing. Decide on your story, and then describe what makes it special.
An organization makes several assumptions when deciding to build a product. These presumptions may consist of the following:
- Who the target users are
- How the design ought to function
- What marketing tactics to employ
- What structure will function most effectively
- Which form of revenue generation will keep the product viable
No matter how confident a company is in its assumptions, a product cannot succeed unless those assumptions are proven to be correct. The MVP is essential to determine the cost of the investment app.
Marketing Considerations
As a business owner, you need a solid marketing plan for your company. What specific marketing strategies, though, are most effective for investment and finance apps? Here are important things for identifying your target market and developing a potent branding approach.
App Store Optimization
Because App store optimization (ASO) is the most effective technique to gain organic app installations, enhancing your mobile app’s visibility on app stores with ASO will result in higher app conversion rates.
App store optimization also concentrates on optimizing the app’s marketing content, including the title, icon, screenshots, description, and video. Due to this, ASO is frequently referred to as app store SEO.
The ideas can be distinguished from one another even though app store optimization and app store SEO have many similarities, like the use of keywords and conversion optimization.
Google Search Ads
Search campaigns are text advertising on search results pages that help you connect with consumers as they look for the goods and services you provide on Google. Pay-per-click (PPC) ads can be placed on Google search results to drive traffic to the app store page.
You may target your ads to individuals specifically looking for your goods and services, which is ideal for increasing sales, leads, or traffic to your website.
What motivates search campaigns?
- Leads and sales
- Increasing your online signups and sales
- Using leads could be a good idea if your sales cycle is longer
- Simple setup
- Selecting keywords and writing text advertising
- Using Smart campaigns
- Reaching out to folks who are actively looking for what you have to offer
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is the practice of promoting your business and making sales on social media sites like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
Social media marketing is when your company releases a new product, and you intend to advertise the launch on social media. PPC ads can also be placed on social media, and organic content can be created at little to no cost.
Social media marketing is when you engage with your customers in online discussion forums. It also counts as social media marketing if you produce interesting content that illustrates the principles and history of your company.
Monetization
Now that you’ve marketed your app to people, you can leverage your user base or interested individuals to generate revenue.
Of course, developing investment software is not a charitable endeavor, and you want to profit from your work. Here are three convenient ways to monetize from the investment app.
Paid App
The easiest way to make money is to charge users to download the app. To keep your application free, you should still include advertisements, b but keep in mind that customers frequently find in-app advertisements unpleasant, so only promote relevant things.
Some examples of apps utilizing this strategy are Webull and InvestApp.
SaaS Model
SaaS, which stands for software as a service, allows users free access to the app but withholds certain features unless they pay a fee.
The software is available online from the supplier. While the supplier handles the infrastructure and security, customers can typically access the program through a web browser.
Revenue Commission
This model entails a commission on revenue made in the form of a small percentage or a small “service fee” when money is withdrawn.
Robinhood set the standard for 0 percent commissions in the US and has been the go-to platform for investors in “meme stocks” like GameStop and AMC Entertainment. Other apps also adopted this investment strategy, which caused some platforms to prohibit certain trading stocks.
To more effectively compete with Robinhood, larger investment platforms like Charles Schwab and E-Trade in the US have also slashed commissions. Additional features like fractional shares and interest on the balance have also been added.
Idea Maker’s Experience in Mobile App Development
If you’re interested in building an investment app but need assistance navigating the process, then look no further – Idea Maker is here to help. Our team has completed numerous mobile app development projects and is dedicated to bringing your investment vision to life. Contact us today to schedule a free consultation.
