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Money Transfer App Development
A Complete Guide
ScienceSoft relies on 34 years in IT and 18 years in creating solutions for banking and financial services to help companies design and develop robust money transfer applications.
Contributors
ScienceSoft's Head of Mobile Department
ScienceSoft's Financial and Banking IT Consultant
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Money Transfer Application Development: Summary
Money transfer application development helps introduce a solution that enables an easy, fast, and secure way to make domestic and cross-border funds transfers. Custom money transfer apps support all required currencies and transfer methods, provide full traceability of funds movement, offer advanced security of transfer data, and smoothly integrate with transaction processing systems.
How to create a money transfer app in 8 steps
- Analyze business needs and elicit requirements.
- Create a detailed project plan.
- Design a money transfer application.
- Select an optimal tech stack.
- Develop and test the application.
- Establish app integrations.
- Deploy the application to production.
- Handle after-launch app support and evolution.
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Timelines: 6–11 months on average. Cost: $120,000–$400,000+, depending on the solution’s complexity. Use our free calculator to estimate the cost for your case. Team: a project manager, a business analyst, a solution architect, a UX/UI designer, a DevOps engineer, a back-end developer, a front-end developer, a QA engineer. User groups: individuals, businesses from any industry, money transfer service providers (agents from a financial sector). |
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With 750+ IT professionals on board, ScienceSoft offers various cooperation models and can promptly provide all necessary competencies to develop your money transfer app end to end.
Key Features of a Money Transfer Application
Being a comprehensive digital wallet at its core, a money transferring app provides robust functionality for convenient and secure funds transfer, full visibility, and streamlined control of transfer transactions.
Account management
- Adding, saving, and updating personal info, a billing address, a bank account and payment card details, etc.
- Geography-based KYC/AML and OFAC verification.
- Automated approval for valid accounts.
- Multi-language accounts.
- End-to-end audit trail of all account activities.
- A digital assistant to help app users solve account-related issues.
Sending and receiving money
- Support for various methods of digital money transfer, including:
- Funds transfer to the bank account using the name, address, account number of a money recipient, SWIFT or IBAN of the recipient bank (for international transfers).
- Financial transfers to the bank card using card details (a cardholder’s name, a card number, an expiration date) of a money recipient.
- In-app money transfer using an email address, a phone number, or an account ID/e-wallet address of a money recipient.
- Intrabank and interbank electronic money transfers.
- Domestic and cross-border transfers.
- Multi-currency transfers, including cryptocurrency transfers.
- Creating custom templates for particular recurring online payments (utilities, telecoms, insurance, etc.) and P2P transfers (to family members, friends), assigning a preferred transfer method.
- Automatically calculating and applying money transfer fees and agent commissions where relevant.
- Notifications on successful or failed transactions, received funds, etc.
- Instant generation of money transfer receipts.
- Creating money return requests on the wrong transactions and receiving funds to the specified payment method.
Funds movement tracing
- A real-time view into sent and received funds by period, country, amount, money sender/receiver, and more.
- A complete history of the money transfer transactions.
- Automated generation of reports on the funds movement (by period, category, transaction amount, payer, receiver, country, etc.).
- Tracking transaction fees by type (international transfer fees, funds withdrawal fees, etc.).
- (optionally) Immutable record of transfer transactions in the blockchain ledger for facilitated traceability.
Balance management
- Automated updates of the account balance upon money sending/receiving.
- Depositing money to the account balance from a bank account, a debit/credit card, an account with a crypto exchange platform, etc.
- Scheduled and ad hoc money withdrawal to the bank account, card, etc.
- Automated conversion of the account balance and transferred amounts to the user-defined fiat currency or a cryptocurrency.
- A configurable dashboard with up-to-date currency exchange rates.
P2P borrowing request management
- Instant messaging for convenient communication between the peers.
- Template-based creation of borrowing requests.
- Scheduled and ad hoc submission of a borrowing request to a particular peer.
- Customizable dashboards on borrowing requests and associated transactions.
- Notifications to the lenders on the received borrowing requests and to the borrowers on the approved borrowing requests.
Security and compliance
- Multi-factor authentication, including biometric authentication (e.g., fingerprint or facial recognition).
- Money transfer data encryption, including asymmetric encryption (for crypto transfers).
- AI-powered fraud detection.
- Alerts on the detected suspicious user activity.
- Automated SAR reports.
- Transaction e-signing.
- Compliance with AML/KYC, PCI DSS, ISO 20022, PSD2 and GDPR (for the EU), other relevant global, country- and industry-specific regulations.
Essential Integrations for Money Transfer Software
To enable fast and accurate funds movement between the involved parties, a money sending app needs to seamlessly transmit data on the requested money transfer transactions to the processing system of a chosen bank. The latter validates the sender’s personal and financial information and passes transactions to the relevant regional or global processing networks (e.g., the ACH network, SWIFT, VISA / MasterCard / American Express card network, etc.) to finalize funds settlement between the money sender’s and money receiver’s banks.
In money transfer app development projects, ScienceSoft relies on market-available open banking APIs to connect the app to the bank’s processing system, facilitate access to the user information necessary for KYC verification, and allow real-time acquisition of up-to-date exchange rates for multi-currency transfers.
NB! Cryptocurrency transfer processing requires integration with dedicated blockchain networks of the crypto coins that a money transfer app supports. ScienceSoft employs market-available cryptocurrency APIs (e.g., Coinbase API, CoinGate API) to streamline the connection of a money transfer app to the required blockchain networks.
Depending on the business model, a funds transfer app may also need to be integrated with an accounting system of the app provider, for example, to instantly record data on the received transaction fees. Additionally, the solution may be connected to a data analytics system to share relevant data required to analyze the app users’ behavior, which is essential, e.g., for app monetization via in-app advertising. ScienceSoft can also build ready-to-use APIs to enable quick and easy app integration with business systems of its corporate users.
How to Create a Money Transfer App
A typical process of developing a money transfer application with ScienceSoft looks as follows:
Step 1.
Analyze business needs and elicit requirements
From the very beginning and through the whole project, ScienceSoft maintains close and consistent collaboration with a client’s team to get an in-depth understanding of their money transfer needs or the app vision and avoid the risk of costly redevelopment. At this stage, our consultants:
- Analyze a client’s current business situation and business needs / product vision.
- Elicit and document requirements for the application, including:
- The required app type (web or mobile app for money transfer).
- Requirements for the app’s functional capabilities, for example, support for particular transfer types (P2P transfers, P2B transfers), transfer methods (bank transfers, card-to-card transfers, etc.), currencies, transfer models (e.g., recurring transfers), and more.
- The types and formats of data the app should be able to process.
- UX requirements.
- Non-functional requirements for the app (performance, scalability, availability, latency, etc.), including security and compliance requirements (with AML and KYC, PCI DSS, ISO 20022, etc.).
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Step 2.
Create a detailed project plan
By accurately planning money transfer app development, ScienceSoft’s project managers lay the basis for transparent, KPI-driven cooperation with minimized risks. This stage includes:
- Defining objectives and KPIs.
- Determining project deliverables, duration, schedule, and budget.
- Deciding on the roles in the project team and designing collaboration workflows.
- Identifying possible project risks, creating risk mitigation strategy and plan.
- Estimating TCO and ROI of the money transfer application.
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Step 3.
Design a money transfer application
- Architecture design. We describe how the solution’s functional modules should perform at the code level and decide on the best-fitting approach to the integration between the app’s components.
- A detailed list of features. Apart from the core features, the list covers recommended security features for the app’s infrastructure and compliance procedures to meet the required standards and regulations.
- UX/UI design for the required user roles (individuals, corporates, admins, etc.). We perform UX research, deliver prototypes, conduct usability testing, create the visually appealing style of the app, and provide UI mockups.
- A plan of integrations. We advise on optimal integration solutions (banking APIs, crypto APIs, etc.) and design custom integrations with existing back-office systems, if needed.
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Step 4.
Select an optimal tech stack
- Defining techs and tools required for the money transfer app development.
- Comparing different techs and tools in the context of documented business requirements.
- Selecting the optimal techs and tools.
To optimize project duration and costs, we employ cross-platform techs and ready-made components (building blocks for the app logic, prebuilt UI components, OOTB deployment scripts, open-source online payment APIs, etc.), if applicable.
Step 5.
Develop and test the application
At ScienceSoft, this stage starts with configuring CI/CD pipelines and setting up container orchestration tools to facilitate further app development, integration, deployment, and release. Upon establishing the automation environment, our team proceeds with creating the app’s back end, implementing a PCI DSS-compliant storage for app users’ sensitive data, and developing role-based user interfaces.
We perform quality assurance of each app component and check how the components work together in parallel with coding to eliminate possible vulnerabilities and logic errors and fix any defects before deployment.
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Step 6.
Establish app integrations
At this stage, ScienceSoft’s team integrates the app with required software. We conduct integration testing to guarantee proper functioning the integrated solution.
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Step 7.
Deploy the application to production
We configure the app’s infrastructure, backup and recovery procedures, implement relevant security tools (authorization controls for APIs, DDoS protection algorithms, firewalls, IDSs / IPSs, etc.), and set the ready-to-use app live.
ScienceSoft can also assist in creating a website for app promotion or uploading the money transfer app to the required web or mobile app stores to streamline app release.
Our team can draw comprehensive role-specific user guides to help individuals and businesses quickly learn how to operate a new money transfer application.
Step 8.
Handle after-launch app support and evolution
ScienceSoft offers a range of services to ensure the smooth operation of the money transfer app in the long run. Particularly, our team can:
- Monitor the app performance and handle operational issues.
- Scale the app to serve a growing number of users.
- Perform security and compliance audits.
- Develop and release new functionality according to a company’s or end users’ evolving needs.
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Money Transfer App Development: Success Stories by ScienceSoft
Create Your Money Transfer Application with Professionals
ScienceSoft applies 18 years of experience in payment software development to provide companies with:
Implementation consulting
- Business needs analysis/Product conceptualization.
- Optimal feature set, architecture design, and tech stack for the app.
- A plan of integrations with the required systems.
- Security and compliance consulting.
- Providing a money transfer app implementation plan, including a risk mitigation plan.
End-to-end development
- Money transfer app conceptualization.
- Architecture design.
- App development.
- Developing APIs to expand the app’s integration capabilities.
- Application integration with the required systems.
- Quality assurance.
- Support and evolution (if required).
Why Develop a Money Transfer App with ScienceSoft
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Typical Roles on ScienceSoft’s Money Transfer App Development Teams
Project Manager
Plans the project (deliverables, schedule, budget), coordinates the team, monitors the project progress and reports it to the client.
Business Analyst
Analyzes a client’s business needs/app vision, elicits functional and non-functional requirements for the money transfer app.
Solution Architect
Architects the money transfer app and integration points for its components and required systems.
UX/UI Designer
Designs the user experience and role-based user interfaces of a money transfer app.
DevOps Engineer
Configures the automation environment (CI/CD, containerization, etc.) for facilitated app development, integration, testing, release.
Front-end Developer
Delivers UI of a money transfer app and fixes the defects found by the QA team.
Back-end Developer
Delivers the server-side code of a money transfer app, integrates the solution with the required systems, fixes the defects found by the QA team.
QA Engineer
Creates and implements a test strategy, a test plan, and test cases to validate the quality and security of the money transfer app, reports testing results.
Sourcing Models for Money Transfer Application Development
Our Customers on Their Experience with ScienceSoft
The guys really cared about the online payment solution (a web app + iOS and Android mobile apps) they developed for my company and weren’t happy until they had it perfect. ScienceSoft were very patient with me when I changed my mind about requirements. They also ask the right questions and look for ways to improve on an idea. Their communication was really good, and they explained their approach to all aspects of the development.
We aimed to enhance our web platform and create a mobile app to facilitate POS financing. ScienceSoft offered the needed skills in back-end and front-end development, quality assurance, and Scrum management. Thanks to ScienceSoft, we achieved our project goals on time and within budget. They provided high-quality service and valuable tech insights that aligned well with our vision and specific needs.
We chose ScienceSoft as a technology partner for the mobile banking development project. We were pleased with the outcomes of the project and with the collaboration mode. ScienceSoft brought to the table substantial expertise in mobile application development and a customer-centered approach to application design. We especially appreciate their professional approach to security issues, which were among our main concerns due to strict regulations.
ScienceSoft’s Tech Stack for Money Transfer App Development
In money transfer app development projects, we usually rely on the following technologies and tools:
Costs of Building a Money Transfer Application
From ScienceSoft's experience, the cost to develop a money transfer application may vary from $120,000 to $1,500,000+.
Major factors that affect the cost of a money transfer app development project are:
- The chosen sourcing model (in-house, outsourced).
- The type of a money transfer app – web or mobile.
- (for mobile apps) Supported mobile platforms (iOS, Android, cross-platform).
- The number and complexity of the app’s functional modules.
- The number and complexity of integrations.
- The number of user roles; UX and UI requirements for each role.
- Performance, scalability, availability, security requirements.
- Fees for the required cloud services, prebuilt app components, integration APIs, security tools, etc.
Sample estimates
$120,000–$180,000
Building a mobile money transfer app of average complexity.
$400,000–$600,000
Developing a web-based money transfer solution.
$1,500,000+
Creating a comprehensive money transfer app with an independent transaction processing system behind it.
FAQ About Money Transfer Apps, Answered
Why create a money transfer app?
The global P2P payment market was valued at $1.19 trillion in 2022 and is expected to reach $4.89 trillion by 2030, witnessing a CAGR of 19.3%. Key factors that drive the popularity of money transfer apps among individuals and businesses are convenient and fast fund transfers and full visibility over transfer transactions. This creates momentum for payment service companies and paytech startups to step into the fast-evolving market with a brand-new solution and promptly generate revenue.
How to start a money transfer app with minimal risks?
At ScienceSoft, we analyze the economic feasibility of money transfer app development for each company-specific case to help our customers confidently start their development initiative. We also deliver a step-by-step project roadmap for risk-free application launch and provide detailed estimates for accurate budget planning.
How to create a money transfer app without breaking the bank?
We always identify cost optimization opportunities and help our clients reduce development budgets. Some ways to optimize the money transfer app cost are:
- Partially or fully outsource the project (this step alone ensures 30–50% lower costs).
- Thoroughly plan the app’s tech design to avoid costly redevelopment.
- Rely on cross-platform mobile techs and employ prebuilt components where possible.
- Opt for iterative development to speed up payoff.
How do money transfer apps make money?
There is a variety of options to generate revenue with your app, and the choice should be made based on your preferences towards a particular business model. Some examples of monetization strategies for money sending apps are:
- Charging a fee for each transaction that takes place in the app (a flat fee or a percentage of the transferred amount).
- Applying a markup on the exchange rate for transactions that involve currency conversion.
- Investing the funds that pend processing and earning the interest on the float.
- Charging a fee for premium services, e.g., for higher transfer limits or faster processing.
- Selling in-app advertising.
How to make a money transfer app success?
Seamless user experience, sleek visual style, comprehensive functionality, stable performance, and advanced security are the five pillars of a winning money transfer application. Prioritize these critical aspects at the app planning and development stages to ensure high value of your app for end users and drive high ROI. And if you need help with designing and building your funds transfer solution for excellence, do not hesitate to turn to ScienceSoft for help.
About ScienceSoft
ScienceSoft is an international IT consulting and software development company headquartered in McKinney, Texas. We provide end-to-end application development services to help companies design and build reliable and secure money transfer apps. In our projects, we employ robust quality management and data security management systems backed by ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 certifications.