Financial app maker goes global

In business for a little over six months, the group behind financial app innovators iNavtas is secretive about its client base, but the collection of milestones reached by the business over the past year indicates it is certainly doing something right.

Having moved into Dublin's Digital Hub offices late last year, iNavtas rented space for three people. Within two weeks, it had doubled its workforce. By early this year there were eight people – seven developers and operations manager Camille Donegan – working for the company's founder, Paul Cryan, in Dublin, while a development hub had been created in Porto Alegre, Brazil, with additional sales teams operating in both Holland and Germany.

“We had contacts in several countries from previously working together in the financial services industry,” explains Donegan. “While the Irish element [of the firm] began first, it was then a case of trying to produce several of these financial services apps on an ongoing basis and that led us to setting up in Brazil.”

A former colleague of Donegan and Cryan's in South America was hired to begin building a team of developers there. Donegan says that Brazil currently has an "amazing" generation of well-educated workers in this space who admittedly provide a "cheaper" alternative to basing all development projects in Europe.

Niche area
Explaining the company's actual end product further, Donegan says that while "lots of people are making mobile apps" iNavtas focuses on apps that "not your average, straightforward content-based applications – it's much more 'high-tech' for want of a far better term than that".

She says that over the past 18 months Cryan had “seen that there was really a niche area of opportunity” when it came to “fast-to-market mobile application development in the financial services sector”.

The calculation “engines” the company creates are aimed at “any client that needs some manner of mathematical modelling” in app format.

Mobile software programs are built to allow organisations to manage any business process that deals with money on mobile devices in a secure, usable manner.

The iNavtas portfolio is designed to help produce accounts, sales, payroll, billing, budget management, credit card processing or business intelligence apps, with the latter helping companies mine their financial system data for a better view of their overall operations as well as creating “meaningful management information”, as the company’s website puts it.

Profitable manner
Extending finance, sales, customer service and marketing efforts to mobile platforms is something that many companies in the financial sector have shied away from thus far.

For those companies rooted in “traditional models” Donegan says that iNavtas can take “legacy applications” and leverage them in a profitable manner through their apps.

Certainly global financial institutions are the main target market, with two such “large” institutions having already signed up to use the company’s services. In addition, an accountancy practice and solicitors are also set to join their client list in the coming month.

'Lab-on-hire' feature
According to Donegan, over the next year the company is almost certain to increase its number of employees in the Dublin office, alongside more positions created outside the country in both sales and development roles.

She says the privately-funded business will not only design apps for customers but also provide consultancy services, product and security testing and post-deployment support.

The company is also particularly keen to expand its “lab-on-hire” feature, where iNavtas provides businesses with a development team to work in-house on specific financial app projects

“We want to accelerate our market reach in Germany and Holland and drive our ‘lab-on-hire’ model,” says Donegan as well as bringing more big data-focused products to market in that time.

“In short,” she says, “it’s all go!”