The status of Flutter technology in the financial sector

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We are excited to share that our Lead Flutter & Android Engineer, Csongor Vogel has contributed to the first edition of Fintech Sparks¹!

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The aim of Fintech Sparks is to shed light on the components of different success stories, failures or scandals, and to be a companion to the world of fintech for the reader. The recent whitepaper of Peak Financial Services² tackles the biggest hit of the fintech market which was the year 2021 itself! Capital raising, acquisitions and IPOs have taken on an amazing scale. More and more companies are approaching a market capitalization of $100 billion, a customer base of 100 million and the unicorn status of $1 billion is no longer surprising either. 

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In this piece Csongor Vogel, our Lead Flutter & Android Engineer tackles the buzzing topics of Flutter and a leading neobank, Nubank. He also built on his experiences gathered at an interactive industry roundtable discussion on native vs. cross-platform application development. 

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ff. next’s team is at the forefront of Flutter development and has already created several fintech apps with the help of the framework. We truly believe that this technology can save time and money for our clients: by being cross-platform, Flutter provides us with opportunities we have never dreamt of. 

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You can read the translated version of Csongor’s original article below.

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"Using cross-platform technology is not adequate within the financial sector, as it is all about the security of our money." - said someone at a mobile developer roundtable, discussing how native applications (which are developed directly for Android and iOS platforms) can compete with a cross-platform technology that can support those platforms from a single code base, reducing the resources required, including capacity and development time.

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To refute the statement above, let’s just look at examples like Google: instead of native Android development, the company built GooglePay using the Flutter cross-platform technology, and besides the tech giant, Nubank, a recently listed Brazilian digital bank is also at the forefront of exploiting what Flutter can offer.

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Previously, Nubank found that due to the numerous vacant native mobile developer positions, it is not uncommon for a feature (either in Android or iOS) to be completed at different times, lagging behind the development of the other platform, while developers implement duplicated functionalities in separate code bases.

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Therefore the need for using a different, hybrid solution that can eliminate the differences between the two mobile development camps has developed, with which communication can be accelerated as the actors use the same code language.

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Prior to the decision, Nubank examined³ the most popular hybrid solutions (Flutter, React Native, Kotlin Native) regarding the aspects of developer experience, long-term support for the technology, amount of energy invested in adding new or custom UI components to the existing codebase and the pixel-perfect identity of the final results on the target platforms.

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In the end, Flutter outperformed its peers in most of the examined terrains: this is one of the reasons why Nubank has been proudly using the framework as its primary tool since 2019. The ff.next team is also building and striving to spread the framework widely.

We hope that you found this blog post useful! Do not hesitate to follow us, so you won’t miss interesting stories in the future either. This article was provided by Csongor Vogel, Lead Flutter & Android Engineer at ff.next. Melinda Havas, Head of Marketing & Business Development and Bence Siklós, Business Analyst revised the content.

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¹ https://sparks.fintechvilaga.hu/202201

² https://peakfs.io/

³ https://cdn.nubank.com.br/mobile/taskforce/nubank-mobile-architecture-task-force-mission-report.pdf

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Sources:

• https://flutter.dev/showcase/nubank
• https://building.nubank.com.br/why-we-think-flutter-will-help-us-scale-mobile-development-at-nubank/
• https://building.nubank.com.br/scaling-with-flutter/

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