3 reasons why leaders in finance and banking love Bitrise

With banking becoming more and more mobile, the finance industry is shifting its focus to mobile finance apps to better serve its customers. The number of daily active users of fintech apps has grown 337% from January 2020 to October 2021, as reported by Amplitude. 

When it comes to scaling mobile fintech apps, agility and security become extremely important — and that’s where Mobile DevOps and mobile CI/CD come in.

In this article, we’ll go over why leaders in finance and banking choose Bitrise as their Mobile DevOps platform — they can optimize their release strategies, build more secure apps, and shorten build times.

1. Faster go-to-market

Fintech apps should work towards optimizing their app release strategies for frequent releases. Our research on the performance of apps in the finance category found that frequent app releases correlated with higher app store rankings. 

The average release frequency for the top 10 iOS finance apps in the US is just 11 days. And as the graph shows, the more slowly an app releases new updates, the lower it will rank.

Affirm is the publicly traded financial technology company that created Affirm SuperApp — a one-stop shop for its shopping, payments, and financial services. Switching to Bitrise gave Affirm more time to add new functionalities, expand the app, and scale the team. As a result of enhanced features and a faster go-to-market time, Affirm’s number of monthly active users increased — and both their iOS and Android apps have consistently high ratings in the app stores: 4.9 and 4.5, respectively. 

“Our build times shortened from over 60 minutes to 12-18 minutes on Bitrise and parallel builds save us many hours a day. Our build success rates are above 90% and our app store ratings are consistently high,” says Edward Smith, a Software Engineer at Affirm.

2. Shorten build times

As we know, mobile apps can benefit from releasing more frequently to the app stores. And to achieve this speed, engineers need to find ways to improve workflows to save time. Ultimately, shortening build times is one of the best ways to achieve this goal.

Generali Italia is one of Europe’s largest insurers with a nationwide network of 40,000 distributors. The company builds multiple customer-facing apps, such as MyGenerali, an insurtech app for their clients, Genertel+, as well as an internal application for their employees.

“Since we started using Bitrise, our build times are at least 20% faster, team management has become easier, and platform updates are no longer an issue. As a result, we’ve managed to deliver our new customer-facing app, Genertel+ faster than expected,” says Alex Casagrande, Head of Frontend Development at Generali Italia.

3. Build a more secure app

In the finance space, it's impossible to build an app without considering security and compliance regulations and requirements. But beyond consideration, mobile teams in finance need to iterate on frequent security testing in order to build a more secure app.

Bitrise helps teams to expand on critical security processes, from threat modeling to flaw detection, to ensure the safety and security of the app’s end users. By shifting left on security testing — as in, injecting automated security checks into the CI/CD workflow earlier and more often — finance teams build a more secure app.

The team at N26 uses Bitrise to shift left on security. Prior to using Bitrise, N26’s mobile team released app store updates every three weeks, but after gradually automating and expanding security checks with Bitrise, they reached a stable, almost weekly release cadence.

The responsibility of most of N26’s security maintenance shifted from the team to the platform, which enabled them to speed up crucial security pre-screens and identify issues, even before the app goes to testers. The N26 team reduced the time they spend on testing by 80%, from 2.5 hours to a half hour. 

‍"Bitrise has been instrumental in helping us run builds more efficiently, test new features before releasing them to millions of users, and ensure our users’ banking information stays secure,” says Dama Damjanovic, Principal Engineer at N26.

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Using Bitrise to streamline your CI/CD pipeline

Finance and banking apps are constantly juggling speed, security, and end-user experience to keep up with industry trends. Using a Mobile DevOps platform like Bitrise helps you optimize your CI/CD pipeline so you can roll out new iterations faster. You also give your team the information they need to react quickly to user feedback and bugs.

By leveraging Bitrise’s extensive pre-built Steps and Workflows, finance teams can introduce access control, automated security tests, regression tests, code signing, and more. 

For example, in a Bitrise Workflow for a finance app, you might start your CI/CD pipeline with Bitrise’s SSH and automated code signing. Following that, you might customize your own workflow to mirror the following example:

What’s next?

Whether you’re building for Android or iOS or working cross-platform, setting up a basic CI/CD platform on Bitrise is a simple four-step process:

1. Sign up for a Bitrise account with your git provider, email, or SSO. Bitrise has a robust free plan, so you can sign up now, find what works for you, and choose a plan later.
2. Create a Workspace. You will be prompted to create your first Workspace after signing up. A Workspace is an environment that allows you to manage your Bitrise apps and the team members working on the apps.
3. Set up access to your app’s repository. During this process, we also run our project scanner to detect the platform of your app (e.g., iOS) and generate default workflows with all the necessary steps you need to build and deploy your app.
4. Follow our different guides to further customize your workflows to meet the specific needs of your app and platform type.

With these four steps, you’ve successfully set up your app on Bitrise.

Happy building!