As a new Fintech preparing to come to market with your new services there are many demands on what may initially be limited resources.
You will need to obtain your FCA licence, create the platform on which your service will operate, take on board the necessary staff to satisfy the regulatory requirements and service your customers and then market the service to your target sector.
How should you prioritise resources?
Clearly, the new operation will need to be adequately staffed with people with sufficient knowledge and skills to satisfy the regulator. This will include, ensuring the business will be managed properly, customers are onboarded correctly, treated fairly and funds will be secured.
The new service will need to be heavily marketed in the initial stages in order to create awareness among the target market and build the necessary mass.
As a new Fintech you will have created and designed a new service for your target market.
This will need to be built on a platform that will manage all the back end functionality.
You will need to ensure this platform is secure. One of the main outcomes for the financial crises in 2008 was a lack of trust within the banking sector. The FinTech sector has been able to leverage that lack of trust and gain support. You would not want to be the victim of a cyber attack and lose that trust. Your platform needs to be built to withstand potential problems but also continues to develop as the threat from cyber security evolves. This can take up a lot of time.
You have your FCA licence, but now you will need to ensure that your systems continue to stay up to speed with the ever changing regulatory environment. With each new piece of regulation you will need to adjust your systems or create new ones to comply. To implement a regulatory framework and constantly ensure compliance can take up a lot of time and cost.
You can decide to build a platform from the outset incorporating the above but will need to be aware of the time this can take and the development costs involved, not just initially but ongoing.
The temptation would be to build a platform that will get you to market as quickly as possible, saving money, which may be in short supply at this stage. This may solve a short term requirement but without paying too much attention to the long term this approach could lead to issues in the mid to long term which will not be simple to resolve.
This is why, when looking to allocate resources you need to look at the limits and expertise of your staff.
With the imperative being to get your service to market and start generating revenues it is important to understand your strengths, your customer offering and user experience, and where you will be best served by bringing in experts to create the critical base infrastructure.
You chose to build your new service upon a proven Account Management Platform. This will come with all the security, regulatory framework, functional modules and connections you need to launch, with all the expertise to manage this platform going forward. You can then use the skills you have internally to develop your services on top of this base platform and get to market in the shortest time and at minimal cost, while concentrating your efforts on what you do best.
If you would like to discover more about how creating your service on a proven base platform will increase your speed to market, whilst also future proofing your business then please contact us here or call +44 (0)207 048 0470