6 approaches to ensure sustainable growth for your Fintech platform

The fintech landscape is evolving at an exceptional pace, with more advanced products and services emerging every year.

For businesses that have launched fintech platforms and apps, it can be a difficult balancing act to stay in touch with an ever-growing industry while ensuring sustainable growth within their own platform.

However, there are a number of measures that can be taken to ensure that fintech platforms have all the tools available to them to grow organically and reach new audiences even despite the highly competitive landscape that surrounds the industry.

With this in mind, let’s take a look at six approaches companies can take to ensure sustainable growth for their fintech platform:

1. Make sure your platform is ready to support your ambitions

This applies to just about every business in just about every industry. Before you can consider leveraging growth for your platform, you must first take the time to look at your product and ask yourself some questions about readiness.

When it comes to scaling businesses, it’s not just about increasing your ambitions, you also need to consider whether your platform can adapt to a larger workload without affecting its overall performance.

If you are not yet ready to expand your product, it can lead to several problems that can eat into your existing revenue. Plus, if your market isn’t there, paying to expand your reach can also hinder your bottom line.

2. Calibrate the road map

When anticipating growth in the fintech world, it’s important to manage expectations between building a leading product and managing time to market.

Here it is important to remember that it is not only your platform that must be scalable to ensure growth. Your entire business model must follow suit – from your organization, technology infrastructure, to compliance and personnel. This raises questions about your priorities in terms of the rate of growth and skills that your team needs to take on to ensure sustainable scaling of your platform.

While you may be itching to ramp up your growth, building a scalable infrastructure takes time. This means building a sensible roadmap that includes your vision for the future and the level of expertise required to expand in a sustainable way.

(Image: LinkedIn)

As the chart above illustrates, exponential growth can only be achieved when your business has established its market fit and worked to optimize the right channels.

3. Prioritize trust

Trusted brands are not built overnight – especially when it comes to the world of fintech and open banking.

When developing a fintech platform, it’s likely that open banking will be an integral part of your product – providing the advanced services that are central to your service. Open banking is generally centered around using a third party to secure access to financial data from a bank with the user’s consent. It will then extract the data and use it to provide personal financial services. This consent can be given and withdrawn at any time, and in a landscape governed by the GDPR, this aspect of privacy is a major consideration for all parties.

To grow your fintech, you must always secure consent to access the financial data of your users. This means that obtaining permission to access financial data is a key point in a fintech’s scaling strategy.

One of the most important ways to ensure this consent is to build trust in your platform as a priority. For example, the generation of user-friendly terms and conditions or privacy rules can give a greater degree of trust in a product.

4. Never skimp on safety

If you want to grow your fintech firm, the key area you should look to increase your spending on security. Keeping your customers’ personal data safe should be a top priority for every fintech startup, and there should never be any risk of oversight when it comes to security, compliance and regulatory policies in all areas of operations.

Growth may depend on spending money across the board to upgrade infrastructure and preparedness, but no amount of spending can repair the reputational damage a company can suffer from experiencing a security breach.

While this may seem like a lot of spending on a less-than-glamorous aspect of your fintech platform, security measures can actually be highly marketable as a key feature of your business.

Although it can weigh in as a significant expense to scale, significant security protocols can be a tool to ensure more growth and attract more customers who are willing to trust you with their finances.

5. Monetize expertise

While we’ve discussed the fact that scaling can be a costly process, securing growth can also open the door to new revenue streams.

Because trust is an important component of opening a fintech platform to new customers, it means that expertise can not only be shared, but also monetized. By building industry-specific online learning resources, you can take advantage of premium content in the form of PDF downloads, subscription-based podcasts and video-based learning.

The beauty of monetizing your industry expertise is that it can not only strengthen your content lineup for visitors, but it can also enhance your reputation as a thought leader and expert in your field.

There are many ways you can incorporate a monetized course into your fintech platform, including:

• Specialization in a particular subject or niche

• Build a new website or incorporate your learning content into your current website

• Uploading and promoting expert content

Furthermore, setting up top-notch learning resources in an industry like fintech can pave the way for greater profits due to the fact that your earnings are only limited by your traffic flows.

6. Anticipate what’s next for your platform

It’s not enough to lay out your growth roadmap and consider the primary factors that will come into the mix as you expand your platform. You also need to keep in mind all the factors that will affect your growth.

Consider exactly how your business is set to scale, the new products you’ll develop, the fresh geographic regions you’ll branch into, and what additional interactions will be critical to implementing the new systems and vendors that can enable you to continue growth.

By taking the time to understand your expected growth rates and the markets you will enter as a result, you can be more aware of the funds you need to bring your product to market and whether you can afford to grow in the way you expects.

By getting the above approaches right, you will not only ensure that your product makes it to market, but you can protect yourself against a potential impasse with your platform that could prevent further expansion later on.

Fintech can be a complex and unpredictable industry, but that shouldn’t stop you from growing your product sustainably as and when it makes sense to take the next step for yourself and your fintech platform.