As you’re reading this article, it’s not hard to guess that you somewhat relate to a fintech startup. Sooner or later you’ll find yourself sitting in a conference room with your team, discussing the next step your business should take. You’ve got a fantastic idea for your fintech product on the whiteboard, but then everyone turns their heads towards an empty chair next to the table — a place that belongs to your future fintech developer.
If you need to hire a fintech programmers, you should get prepared to hire the entire team. The reason is simple: fintech development requires diverse expertise, so it’s just impossible for one person to wear that many hats. So in the end, starting the search for fintech developers can be more troublesome than exciting, and you may even start finding excuses why it’s better to do it tomorrow.
However, your rivals won’t waste their time and release a similar product before your software solution rocks the market’s floor. Seems intimidating, but as the first rule of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy says “Don’t panic!”. The JatApp team has worked on such complex fintech products as payment gateway, so we know how to assemble a team of professional fintech app developers. In this article, we’re going to share our knowledge about hiring fintech developers and make them work as a team.
Why recruiting the entire team is a must and why “good software developers” aren’t enough
Once you’re going to build a fintech solution from scratch, you can’t just hire a full-stack developer who will create a product of high quality. Despite the time and money you can afford, it’s just beyond a human capacity to develop a good fintech solution alone.
First of all, any fintech software must be compliant with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS). Your fintech developer can’t just follow specific criteria and boom — you get a PCI DSS compliant product in the bag. Compliance with PCI DSS is proved by certification given to organizations, software vendors, and businesses rather than individual people.
You can’t also say: “This guy is smart enough, give them a PCI DSS certificate, please”. The matter of finance is too serious to delegate it to one person, even though this person is going to create a digital solution that will make that matter look less complicated.
PCI DSS certification is the number one reason why you need to hire a fintech development team from a software vendor that has a relatable license. When talking about app development, you should expect your fintech developers to:
Nevertheless, PCI DSS compliance is just a part of requirements you should take into account. If your fintech developers aren’t silly imposters, they have to:
They all don’t have any tech skills but one of them says they have
Together with the PCI DSS license, the list of fintech developer skills is quite impressive, isn’t it? That’s the moment when you can afford to faint, but please, don’t. You now understand why you need to hire the entire team of fintech developers, but the question is “How to do it?”. Let’s talk about it.
Ways to hire fintech developers team
The first and the most obvious way to get a fintech development team for your project is to hire one in-house. It will be a team of tech professionals who work for you full-time, go to your office, and the Team Lead will sit together with you at meetings in a conference room.
Nonetheless, there are several hurdles you can’t ignore. To start with, getting the entire development team is expensive. Aside from paying salary and benefits, you will have to turn out your pockets for such upfront expenses as recruitment, onboarding, and training of the whole team.
But even when you have that much money and your investors faithfully believe in your project, finding relevant tech talents is another roadblock. You’ve already seen the list of requirements, so finding even a couple of talents with expertise necessary for your project is a quest that is next to impossible. Actually, 3 out of 4 companies report difficulties or failure to find relevant talents.
On top of that, you need to make an extra effort to get the PCI DSS license, which is another grunt work to do. You won’t get off with just following the requirements we mentioned above, as dealing with bureaucracies and formalities is an inevitable pain you’ll have to go through.
Your efforts to assemble an in-house team will make sense only in case your project is likely to last more than a year or you’re planning to launch similar fintech products in the future. Otherwise, gathering an in-house team will mean dumping time and money into the void.
The second way, a smarter one, is to outsource your fintech development team from a vetted software development agency. Once you need the entire squad of fintech software engineers to work on your project, it’s reasonable to hire a dedicated development team.
There are several distinct advantages of hiring a dedicated development team. First, you don’t have to spend resources on recruitment and onboarding of your fintech app developers, since your IT vendor will handpick relevant professionals to work on your product.
Second, software development agencies surely have a greater access to the talent pools, as well as previous experience of screening and vetting tech specialists, so team assembly won’t take that much time. Third, you’ll be able to manage your remote fintech development team as if they are your in-house employees working full-time, as communication barriers are extremely rare with dedicated development teams.
Dedicated development teams are good for projects that have a project manager or other relatable role responsible for arrangement of project work. But when you don’t have enough project management skills or simply time to plan deadlines and budgets, you can fully outsource your project to a software development company overseas.
Perhaps, you have a couple of fintech experts in your team, but still not enough to release your product earlier than competitors potentially can. In this case, you can just request a team extension from your IT agency and they will augment your team with a relevant talent.
Whatever engagement model you select for your fintech project, you won’t regret it. Again, you’ll save time, money, and thousands of nerve cells while the end result will delight your investors.
Needless to say, gathering a team of freelancers is out of the question now. We’ll just emphasize that it would be easier to throw money from a window because — the effect will be the same.
But enough of toxic jokes, let’s discuss how to make sure you’re not hiring fraudsters that will deliver you nothing but a twitching eye. (Oh well, we did it again).
Questions to ask at the interview
Since you’re going to hire the entire team, you’ll interview software engineers with various tech stacks, which means that technical interviews will be different. To learn more about interviewing developers with different tech stacks, read our dedicated articles on how to hire Node.js, JavaScript, and React.js developers.
In addition to technical interviews applicable to a tech stack you need for your product, we highly recommend giving your candidates a small task that they should be able to solve regardless of the technology they have experience in. The task is the following.
Your candidate has a banking app with $100 on the account. The candidate tries to send $100 to another account and cash out the same $100 from an automated teller machine (ATM) simultaneously. The candidate is required to explain in detail what’s going on at the mobile app’s backend at this moment.
Hiring the entire team means that their interaction and collaboration is a critical driving force of your project success. That is why we prepared a list of soft skill interview questions that will help you to pick good team players and avoid egocentric brawlers:
The chair is still empty…but the clock is ticking
The chair is still empty in your conference room, and time passes by at a breakneck pace, and you can be easily left behind the pack of your rivals. But you know what to do — hiring a fintech development team is your way to defeat the competitors and release the product before they dare.
JatApp is a PCI DSS compliant software development company that can provide you with a remote fintech development team which you can manage as your in-house employees. At the same time, you can expect a quality product, as we’ve been developing fintech software solutions since 2015 and also have access to the largest pool of fintech development talents in the Eastern Europe.
Want to learn more about how we work? Just contact us, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
