Dozens App Story: Becoming a Top UK Fintech App in One Year

A year has passed since the release of Dozens app to the stores. Now, this fintech application has over 20k of real registered users who are the owners of beautiful yellow and grey debit cards. Dashdevs, as a technology partner, and I, as a digital product owner, have been working on this application from the very first day. My first task was to conduct marketing research, define competitors, and get into the UK fintech sphere. We started with strategic sessions to define functional features and the scope of the application. Our design team created the user interface. We tested different design options on the community and improved the appearance of the application based on the feedback. However, the most valuable and most robust work was done by our CTO, Solution Architect, software developers, devops engineers, and QA team. They’ve managed to finish the task that other teams might call impossible. They created iOS & Android mobile applications in combination with the orchestration layer in 9 months, and this fintech solution has been available for users since November 2018. The results are awesome, and the input from all the members of the Dozens team is magnificent.

All the UK banking industry is under massive digital disruption. Every day neobanks, or as they are called “challenger banks,” emerge in the marketplace. The impact of every brand on the end-users is visible because they are not afraid to trust their money to the branchless institutions, perform online payments, and try new fintech applications as they enter the market. Fintech institution Dozens has got a bunch of nominations during this year:

• Named 25th in the UK Startup 100 Index;
• Ranked 8th in the 2019 Mobile Banking App Review (published by Optima Consultancy);
• Took the 41st place in the list of 100 FinTech Disrupters.

All this was done with a six-month-old fintech brand. Our customers believe in our idea and trust us, and I think it’s the most important thing that we’ve done so far.

Post-Launch Fintech Product Development: What Has Been Done During 2019?

Many business owners think that everything is slow and easy after the first release. It’s the most impressive false expectation that you may have. Believe me, in 2019, Dozens development team was working harder than in the previous year. On the first release, Dozens application had registration process (including KYC, Anti-fraud and AML), payments services, budgeting tool, special account to set money aside, Savers Award game, and a lot of small useful features for everyday use. But it was only a part of the entire product roadmap that we had. Consequently, let me share with you the results that we’ve already developed for the Dozens fintech app.

The Development of Major Customer-Facing Features for the Fintech Industry

I want to start with the features that are visible for every user of the application:

• Bonds: At the beginning of the year, we issued the first bond with a 5% interest rate. This feature was one of the most expected by our customers. The idea of the Dozens brand is that we can earn only if our customers earn. That’s why we provide one of the highest interest rates for the bonds in the UK. However, the release of the bond isn’t just a mobile application feature. We needed to develop back-office that had the functionality to operate with bond bids and rich dashboards for the treasure teams to review the results.
• International payments: The possibility of sending money abroad provided more payment options to our clients. We started with a small list of the eight most popular currencies and then extended to twelve. All of them are working with an indicative exchange rate, which is the most convenient for the customers.
• Split the payment: We allow our users to split the bill in two different ways. First of all, users can send their money requests to the Dozens’ users, so the latter needs to click just one button to approve the request. Another way to split the bill is to send the account details to any messenger the user prefers. A handy feature, as you can imagine.
• iMessage integration: When we work on the Dozens application, we put usability and convenience for the user in the first place. That’s why we’ve developed the integration with iMessage that allows the user to send a money request to the user without opening the mobile application. The receiver gets the particular message that redirects him to the payment screen of the Dozens application.
• Shareholder cards: A few thousands of Dozens customers, who had supported the project on the Seedrs crowdfunding campaign, received grey shareholder cards. Consequently, these users have accounts with two active cards — yellow and grey.
• Investments: Dozens’ ultimate goal is to educate and develop users from ‘spenders’ to ‘savers’ and from ‘savers’ to ‘investors.’ Therefore, the last part of the users’ journey has arrived at the end of the year. We’ve released the investment feature with a possibility to invest in nine portfolios. We simplify the customer investment experience so they can easily pass risk assessment steps and choose the most suitable security holdings for investment.
• Track redesign: We always put much attention to the customers’ feedback, especially about the usability of the mobile application. So, in summer, we updated one of the essential features that helps users control their expenses more wisely and now comes with a new cleaner design for customers’ easy access to information.

Along with all the functionality I’ve mentioned above, we developed a lot of small updates and features. We had at least 2 mobile application builds per month with some updates during this year.

The Role of Platform and Back-Office in Fintech Mobile App Development

If we talk about financial technology solutions, then mobile and web application development is only the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much more functionality in the background that keeps the fintech institution running. Every client-facing feature requires the development of additional services and back-office tools. The customer support, compliance, and treasurer teams always have a bunch of orders for the feature operating and processing users’ requests. Thus, we concentrated our development capacity on improvement and extension of the possibilities for these back office’s clients.

As the Dozens project was growing, we were improving scalability and everyday operations of our platform. We developed a seamless flow for the deployment processes. For our end-users, this means that the application always works the same, and any server-side updates go unnoticed.

Data-driven development becomes one of the most influential trends in the digital product development process. Dozens application has tons of information in the data lake that is carefully processed by the data science team. They’re working in different directions, such as user behavior analysis, anti-fraud tooling, and model creation.

By the way, Dozens app is ready for the Open Banking and PSD2. We’ve already developed a platform that allows Payment Initiation Service Provider (PISP) and Account Information Service Providers (AISP) to use open API to integrate our software solution into their services.

There are many fascinating and vital features, and tools that have been created by the web and mobile app development teams numbering 64 skilled engineers.

PI1: The Introduction of Banking-as-a-Service

Dozens app is ending this year with an outstanding event — we bring the PI1 BaaS ( banking-as-a-service) solution to the world.

PI1 is a cloud-based platform for banks and fintechs that provides end-to-end digital banking services. It integrates multiple solutions into APIs thus allowing to pass KYC in 90 sec, perform all the action with banking cards, and conduct various types of payments. The platform is powered by the advanced analytics platform that analyzes customer journey from the registration to the last action in the application.

But most importantly, PI1 is the platform that runs a powerful and multi-functional Dozens mobile application, and now it’s readily available to others.

Conclusion

Dozens financial institution is rapidly gaining momentum in the banking industry. The idea and the technical approach are powered by a massive digitization and high demand for accessible and efficient digital banking services. Dashdevs development team put their hearts and souls into the development of the mobile application and the platform. Our tech-savvy co-workers are always ready to bring even the craziest ideas of our clients to life. From our side, we provide companies with product owners, business analysts, UI/UX designers, solution architects, web and mobile developers, devops, manual and automation quality assurance engineers. In addition to the production capacities, we offer fintech consulting services that help startups and medium-sized companies streamline their internal processes, enhance performance, and enter the market with a better business strategy and game-changing solution.

With our experience, we’re ready for different fintech products and projects.