Signals Expert Interviews

Business Analysis for Fintechs: What Tech Leaders Need to Know

A deepdive assessment of your business processes and functions may reveal that you could do much better, even if you perform just fine.

For financial service companies, business analysis is necessary to optimize the workflow. For startups, it’s a chance to play it safe. Cases differ, but BA is still a king.

In this article, you’ll learn how to use BA’s power effectively. Find out what are the key considerations when performing business analysis and how different types of Fintechs can benefit from it. Plus, get checklists for doing a business analysis that works.

Business analysis, its goals, and objectives

Business analysis (BA) refers to a set of tasks and techniques business analysts perform to understand how the business works or should work. A thorough assessment of the company’s processes and functions allows an expert to provide recommendations on how to improve them to achieve better results—that’s the primary goal of BA. 

BA Goals

Why Fintechs need BA

When it comes to a specific project, like developing an investment platform, business analysis can help optimize processes on both the project and organization levels. By understanding how your project’s goals should align with the company’s goals, a business analyst can help your management set the processes in the best way possible and reduce time-to-market.

Skipping business analysis may lead to many crucial points missed, which may result in less-than-desired software quality, speed of development, and software performance scalability.

Below, you’ll get a quick overview of the main types of Fintechs and how business analysis can help each.

What financial organizations might need BA

Financial institutions

These are large organizations with a long history, which often rely on legacy software. The problem there might be with maintaining software with outdated standards. 

In this case, BA is necessary to revamp software and make it easier for modern companies to use it. Typical improvements for financial institutions may include:

  • Designing user-friendly and attractive UI
  • Creating intuitive UX
  • Re-architecting software

Financial service companies

Finserves usually don't build software themselves. For instance, many advisory companies find it more reasonable to buy ready solutions or use spreadsheets. Let’s see how this type of companies can benefit from BA in each case.

Spreadsheets: The idea for these companies might be to engineer software to automate accounting work or any other routine tasks. A business analyst may help the organization figure out how to make it the best case and avoid expenses on extra features.

Purchased software: There may be too many accounts and credentials if the company uses several tools from different providers, each for a particular task. In this case, the team may want to create a single sign-on application to integrate all the accounts in one place and avoid moving data from one platform to another. Conducting business analysis will allow the company to enable secure yet user-friendly login/sign-on and system access based on role.

Fintech startups 

Right from the start, a business analyst may help entrepreneurs realize if their platform fixes the pain points of future users. The job of a business analyst will also be to find the best way to develop the solution at a reasonable cost.
Having a soft landing is better than taking a hard fall. If the analysis proves the idea unrealistic, too costly, or non-competitive, entrepreneurs will save time and money for a better try.

Related article: Using BPMN to Scale Business Processes in Fintech
→ Read now 

Key considerations when performing BA + Checklists

For legacy software  

First, the analyst needs to define how the system works now and why it works this way.

- What were the business rules in that software?

- What are the new business needs?

- How would the system better work to match these new needs, comply with current regulations, and be more accessible?

Then it’s essential to figure out how to not copy the legacy software to the new UI/UX and avoid the existing problems. The latter may include redundant and overlapping operations or functionalities and a lack of compliance with modern requirements. Getting new UI/UX as the only benefit with the problematic old processes and functionality in the background is too small a plus.

It’s crucial to work with data because legacy software already has a lot of indispensable data. Business analyst figures out how to resolve inconsistencies and duplications and map all data to the new system so that nothing vital is lost.

Automating data processing 

First, the analyst has to define the problem and if building software will help.

- Is it a time-consuming manual data input?

- Can it be avoided?

- Or maybe it's ineffective data systematization? 

If manual data input and dozens of spreadsheets are necessary, then building a solution will be of little help. In some of these cases, instruments to synchronize the work of people across teams might do the trick.

If there’s a need for software, then we also analyze the data the company uses. 

- What kind of data is it? 

- Where does it come from? 

- How should it be presented?

- Where is it used? 

- How should it be stored?

- Who needs it, and who may have access to which data?

Following this checklist, we define the list of functionalities, create a backlog, prioritize and determine which functionality to include in MVP (minimum viable product). 

BA Techniques

Starting a Fintech company

With startups, we’d use a classical variant of business analysis. Below is the checklist for business analysis. Note that it extends beyond the beginning of development, just as business analysis should.

- Identify objectives

- Analyze the idea market proposition

- Identify competitors

- Put together compliance and industry requirements

- Identify stakeholders and their needs 

- Think of problems that may arise when the software is created and marketed

- Define the MVP scope and make sure it doesn’t grow exponentially

- Clarify document requirements 

- Help developers understand requirements

- Ensure that deliverables correspond with the requirements

Start prepared and stay flexible as you move toward your goals.
Develop with INSART

Why an outside perspective matters

Very often, the company's vision is a bit off-kilter, not quite what will work for them. And it might remain their blind spot until they are ready for an outside perspective. In this case, our business analysts and tech experts analyze the existing solution and requirements for changes to provide the client with a detailed plan for achieving their needs in the best way possible

INSART can help you with BA and much more to achieve the following:

  • Create precisely the product or service that users need
  • Develop a fully-fledged solution at a reasonable cost
  • Make this solution easy to use and maintain
  • Make it scalable

Schedule a quick call to learn more about how a tech partnership with us can help you avoid the pitfalls of software development.

Author: Iryna Savchenko

Editor: Svietoslava Myloradovych

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