Tech Articles

If running a major application has become very difficult because of the problems its monolithic architecture creates, Serverless can be the solution. Take a read at the benefits you can expect and the challenges you need to overcome to make this option work out.

Regardless of the kind of a Web application you intend to build, there are challenges that will always be there. Take a read of what needs to be taken care of first turn to keep your project from going off the rails.

Chatbots have long become habitual. But this doesn’t mean the opportunities they bring have all been exhausted.

Check out how AI chatbots and virtual assistants can pack a punch for even more aspects of your operations if you are in the Insurance business.

Chatbots and virtual assistants are computer programs that use Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to emulate human speech, converse with customers, answer their questions, and guide them through certain actions and procedures. They help provide 24/7 customer support to a large number of concurrent customers, while dramatically relieving the workload on human customer support employees.

Insurance is one of the industries where service providers’ interactions with their customers can be extremely information-intensive. While customer service must quickly answer customer inquiries by managing significant amounts of diverse information, customers often have to figure out rather complex info on the fly. In this information-intensive environment, chatbots, virtual assistants, and AI robo advisers have emerged as powerful aids that are often difficult to do without.

In this Guide, we will dwell on the benefits developing a chatbot or virtual assistant can bring to an insurance company.

Providing workers comp can be a complex and convoluted procedure that needs to be made simple, reliable, and compliant at all times. Take a read at how to do this more optimally through corresponding automation.

Introduction to Workers Compensation Claims Management Software Development Despite employers’ and public organizations’ best efforts to the contrary, working environments worldwide are still not immune to risks that result in employees suffering injuries.

A vast number of production environments are still not safe enough, and those working in them are exposed to health hazards of sorts. These health hazards become a reason for job-related illnesses that require corresponding compensation. Investigating work accidents, keeping track of the related leaves, processing of the related claims, and making the related payouts becomes difficult without automation.

Workers compensation insurance software automates the entire process of providing wage replacement and medical care to an employee, who has suffered a physical or emotional injury in the line of duty, or is suffering from an occupational disease. Such applications allow managing all the aspects in the processing of a workers’ compensation insurance claim. This includes medical certificates, accounts, correspondence, rehabilitation, liability, return-to-work plans, and insurance premium payments. In addition, workers compensation insurance applications can include functionality that allows managing compensation in favor of relatives and other beneficiaries in the case of those workers, who have succumbed to accidents in the line of their duty.

While automating a complex business process and enabling many insurers to encompass one more important business niche, workers’ compensation insurance apps help ensure compliance. They also cut overpayments and prevent work accidents as such.

This article will tell you about some of the opportunities workers’ compensation claim management applications open and the things to pay attention to while developing one.

Insurance industry is already leveraging the advancements in Artificial Intelligence to boost the up-selling process. Find out how your company can benefit from the use of Data Analytics for Customer Segmentation, Predictive Analytics, Chatbots, Virtual Assistants, Recommendation Engines, and Dynamic Pricing.

Unlocking the Power of Artificial Intelligence for Up-Selling in Insurtech Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already changing the ways businesses operate across numerous industries. According to Forbes, the AI market is expected to reach an astonishing $407 billion by 2027.

Insurance and Insurtech companies can truly benefit from the advancements of Artificial Intelligence, and one of the areas that can be improved the most is up-selling.

The concept of up-selling in the insurance industry has been there for years. It refers to the practice of offering additional or upgraded insurance products or coverage to customers beyond their initial or existing policies.

Just like everyplace else, in Insurance selling to a customer you already have is lots easier - no search, less to no competition, smaller costs, and much bigger odds. There’s just one problem - you need to know when and what exactly a specific customer needs. AI solves this one for you - check out how!

Enabling a new level of legal and financial protection for Small Business employees nationwide - this is precisely the task one of our clients, a U.S insurance company that caters for SMPs, entrusted to us. Check out how we’ve enhanced their insurance software platform and helped them achieve their new business goals.

KYC is essential not only to Financial Services, but to many other industries too. Check out how the process can be enhanced using several extremely reliable Face Recognition and biometric Identity Verification approaches.

Protecting financial institutions and their clients against exorbitant amounts of ever more sophisticated fraud needs to start as early as during customer onboarding. Know Your Customer (KYC) is a comprehensive process, designed specifically to ensure this, as well as help combat money laundering, terrorist financing, and corruption. In fact, banks, various lenders and financial services companies are not the only three types of companies that use KYC. Other businesses that deal with somebody else’s funds, like credit unions, payment Fintechs, brokerage firms, cryptocurrency exchanges and asset managers employ industry-specific variations of this process too. For financial institutions, implementing KYC is mandatory in accordance with the various Anti-Money Laundering laws.

So… How does KYC work?

Data security is one of the few things paramount in financial applications. It needs to be ensured in several different areas and right from the start of your Fintech app development.

Take a look at some of the approaches and techniques that can help you ensure that the data in your Fintech application stays secure and intact at all times.

In Fintech, the security, privacy, and integrity of data means the world. This goes equally for trade information, transaction data, and any personally identifiable information (PII) that is to be kept confidential in accordance with the compliance regulations that exist in different geographies.

Frequently, it’s hard to say which is a lesser evil for a financial market player – getting exposed to, and losing a hefty amount in a transaction data breach upfront, or suffering reputational damages and running the risk of having to shell out tens of millions of dollars as a result of non-compliance later.

To be able to keep the risks to a minimum and use the various data security-related options to the full, Fintechs must have a clear and deep enough understanding of the modern data security techniques they can employ in the development of their Fintech applications. This article will tell you about these techniques, as well the more optimal ways to apply them.

A hefty percentage of Fintechs flop - it is not an industry where one can simply wade into an app development project and expect great project outcomes. Gain an understanding of the challenges one usually comes across in Fintech app development to know your options and proactively take part in the development of your Fintech app!

Introduction The Financial services industry is projected to grow several fold in the current decade. Nearly a half of the population of the world remains unbanked. Successful economies emerge worldwide, and new Fintech innovation-enabled business models (like, for example, alternative credit scoring or alternative underwriting) crop up.

Along with the diverse multiple regional differences and regulations that promote the emergence of local Fitech market players, these and other hefty factors guarantee Fintech startups will mushroom in the future. Still, they will be up against a host of security, compliance, scalability, data management, and other challenges that will likely be even more difficult to deal with than before.

As long-time Fintech software developers, we are well-familiar with these challenges. This article will tell you about them and suggest ways to deal with them and the risks they bring.

Fintech at its best - intricate calculation functionality, stringent compliance requirements, a tangle of engineering and other challenges – check out our expertise in the Fintech realm if you need a Fintech app!

In the summer of 2020, one of SPD Group’s eCommerce clients recommended us to a Western lender that intended to implement a complex Fintech software product. The company is a well-established provider of business funding and real-time financing. As of early 2023, they have funded several thousand businesses for a total amount of $ 250 + million.

At the time they got referred to SPD Group, the client already owned an SMB lending app for long-term lending. To increase their business presence and diversify their service offering, the lender made a decision to develop a larger-scale SMB lending platform. In addition to SMB funding, the platform was to allow the client to provide short-term lending to diverse merchants in various industries against future receivables (or proof that the corresponding funds were due to these merchants at a near date). The solution aimed to immediately provide merchants with the working capital they needed, thus eliminating any weekend- or holiday-related delays and the resulting extended settlements.

After a detailed discussion, the client engaged SPD Group to implement the whole of their project.

Take a few minutes to dive deep into the world of Fintech innovation and learn about the latest innovative trends and their impact on the industry.

Introduction

Before going any further, let’s start with the definitions. Fintech is the short for financial technology, and this term describes the use of technology in providing financial services. The term Fintech applications refers to a wide range of technology-powered financial services, products, and applications that disrupt, improve, or even revolutionize traditional financial services delivery.

The benefits that financial applications bring individuals or organizations include but are not limited to, streamlining financial processes, reducing costs, introducing innovative technologies, increasing the efficiency and speed of financial management. Additionally, finance apps are providing more access and customization to financial services.

For example, a Fintech app can provide access to financial services to anyone with a stable internet connection, anytime and anywhere. They can also save time in processing online payments or loan approvals, while offering lower transaction fees and interest rates as compared to other alternatives. Fintech apps are usually tailor-made for specific needs, so you can expect a high level of customization in satisfying your particular needs.

In this article, we will discuss the most popular use cases for Fintech applications. However, keep in mind that in this industry everything is changing fast and there can be groundbreaking solutions right around the corner.

As a client, you can always help your custom software provider maximize the project outcomes. Learn about how to make the most of creating such an important tool in custom software development as Software Requirements Specification (SRS).

Introduction Software Requirements Specification (SRS) is rightfully considered as one of the primary tools in custom software development that helps ensure positive project outcomes. When written the right way, SRS lays a solid foundation for the solution to be built and serves to create a universally understandable vision of the future product.

In other words, SRS helps keep all the project actors on the same page as to the software functionality that needs to be developed. It makes it a lot easier to discuss and adjust this functionality and to avoid various related misunderstandings.

In this article, we’ll detail how one should properly write an SRS document. We’ll describe some of the related best practices, identify the priorities, and share some useful empirical insights.

Are you a CTO looking to outsource a high-scale software development project? Learn about the things you can do and the leverage you have to keep your outsourced project well on track.

If the software product you have in mind is meant to draw in a big target audience, robustly serve a massive number of concurrent users, or scale without constraint for years on end, you are about to start building an enterprise-scale software product.

And this does change the game in many ways, adding more to the list of the pitfalls custom software projects of any size pose. The negative consequences of these pitfalls can easily increase your total project spend, hamper your product’s growth, result in poor product quality, and overextend your time-to-market.

Can you as a client (the business owner, CTO, CIO, or some other high-ranking executive) help make sure your outsourced high-scale custom software development project stays well on track?

Although a very major role certainly belongs to your software outsourcing provider, you hold a lot of leverage even in those instances, when you don’t have almost any in-house development team, or when it’s just a fraction of your external team.

Let’s take a close look at some of the pitfalls you should zoom in on, and find out how you can circumvent them.

A 100% customizable WHITE-LABEL B2B eCommerce solution with full-blown functionality? Sounds like a tall order, but here’s how we’ve pulled it off – way better than most of the competition and with a great result overall.

Challenge

In 2008, the Silicon Valley, CA-based eCommerce startup NimbleCommerce approached SPD Group to implement the idea of a website that would allow shoppers to source the products and services they need based on other shoppers’ reviews and recommendations.

As the website was delivered to the client, they decided to entrust us with implementing a derivative idea that was a great deal more large-scale and aspiring: design and develop an innovative, infinitely customizable white-label promotional and eCommerce platform. The platform was to enable vendors to create promotions and make online sales through a website that looks precisely like one of their own.

Find out how we built an innovative solution for our client and improved business results. This case study will be focused on the latest iteration of the project, and we will provide you with detailed description on its development. 

Challenge

A U.S. technology vendor, dedicated to digitizing various agencies’ construction delivery processes, was looking for assistance in expanding their mission-critical software platform that comprises several products. They approached SPD Group through a referral by a former client of ours, who was well-familiar with our software product development competencies and skills.

The client’s system is a comprehensive construction delivery platform that automates the business processes of the various construction project stakeholders, including construction materials producers and suppliers, construction general contractors, and state transportation agencies. The products that make up the platform efficiently connect these project stakeholders and enable efficient interactions between them. The client entrusted to us the end-to-end development of two of the three products their platform consists of. Additionally, we’ve also augmented their in-house project team, engaged in developing the rest of the company’s platform.

Initially, the client engaged us to develop an e-Ticketing product that allows construction materials’ producers and suppliers and their clients to share sales- and delivery-related data in real time. The product eliminates a great deal of paperwork and makes it a great deal easier to locate tickets.

The second of the client’s products we’ve been engaged in developing constitutes the bulk of our involvement in the project under review. The product represents a comprehensive Web and mobile solution that empowers the buyers and suppliers of building materials with various insights they can generate based on current and historical data. For example, it is possible to aggregate data by customer and display the items and product amounts they’ve purchased by date or for a predefined time period. The user can also display all the clients in a selected area and the purchases they’ve made, indicating the item purchased, their amount, and purchase date. In total, the application allows building more than 20 different charts for various stats that can then be used for analytical and forecasting purposes.

Additionally, the application serves as an industry database for the Construction and Building materials verticals, making it easy to source suppliers, producers, construction materials, and various related products. The mobile version of the application provides access to the full range of the functionality the system’s Web version provides.

SPD Group was responsible for developing both of the client’s products from the ground up.

Read one of the newest articles on SPD Group blog with a Delivery Manager with 10+ years of experience explaining all the nuances of managing a Dedicated Development team in the most efficient way possible. 

Introduction

As the outsourcing industry is continuing to grow, global spending on outsourcing is projected to hit $731 billion this year, Dedicated Development Team Model (DDT) remains one of the most popular ways to engage with software development vendors along with IT Staff Augmentation and Full-Cycle, Project-Based Outsourcing.

We discussed the in-and-outs of hiring a Dedicated Development Team including best use cases, details on forming a team, and benefits it could bring compared to other approaches in this article. This time, we would like to focus on the management aspects to provide you with the fullest perspective possible on this matter.

This model can be a great solution for companies that want to increase their capabilities, savings, and revenues thanks to extended software development expertise. In order to get maximum efficiency from this type of engagement, not only the added expertise itself, but proper management plays an important role.