While PHP is one of the most popular programming languages, it serves as the foundation of the Laravel framework. Terminologically, the latter is a set of components and functionalities that help make app development with PHP more efficient. First of all, the framework is a great aid for developers, allowing them to build scalable and robust software with ease. This results in faster time to market and high-quality products. The technology is used for building the server-side functionality of applications, making Laravel web app development a popular service in the outsourcing field. Laravel is one of the more recent frameworks, and as such, it addresses many issues and optimizes multiple processes compared to existing PHP frameworks.

In this article, we'll explore the application of this technology in fintech app development, examine the benefits of building financial apps with Laravel, and discuss how to find the best backend development services providers who are well-versed in Laravel. Before diving into how Laravel assists the financial industry in project development, let's outline the challenges this field encounters.

Challenges in fintech development

Dealing with sensitive information and large amounts of data, the financial sector faces several unique challenges that require special attention.

Data security

Financial data is a prime target for cybercriminals. In this context, multi-factor authentication and advanced measures such as fingerprint recognition, along with data encryption and tokenization, help prevent unauthorized access.

Scalability

As a fintech platform grows, it needs to handle an increasing number of users and the transactions they make. A microservice architecture, which allows for scaling specific components independently, can ensure scalability.

Compliance

Developing for fintech requires regulatory compliance with various international and regional laws. These regulations include GDPR, AML, KYC, and CTF standards. As regulations are frequently updated and new ones are introduced, this area requires continuous attention from fintech companies.

Expertise

Building a robust application in the financial sector requires expertise across multiple domains, such as financial regulations, cybersecurity, and AI. Beyond technical skills, understanding the intricacies of the financial industry, including banking, investment, insurance, and consumer finance, is critical for developing effective fintech solutions. Therefore, when working with a software developer, it's beneficial if they have experience in building fintech products.

Benefits of the Laravel framework for the fintech sector

Laravel is a robust and flexible framework helping to create a wide range of fintech apps, including digital wallets, payment gateways, personal finance management apps, investment and wealth management platforms, cryptocurrency platforms, and neobanking apps. Here are some more benefits that make the framework valuable for the industry:

Cost

By checking the developer's median salary in the annual Stack Overflow survey, we'll see that compared to other technologies, the PHP programming language, which Laravel is based on, can save its partners quite a sum.

Performance optimization

Caching mechanisms and job queues allow for better optimization of financial app performance. With support for queues, Laravel can optimize user experience by offloading processes like sending emails, processing loans, or generating reports. Regarding caching, which also influences performance, Laravel supports Redis and Memcached backends to serve this purpose.

Localization

For financial organizations aiming for global reach, Laravel can be a perfect choice with its robust localization capabilities. Laravel development allows fintech apps to support multiple languages and regions.

Seamless testing

Laravel has built-in support for automated testing with PHPUnit, enabling developers to write tests easily. This ensures that fintech applications function as intended and helps to catch potential bugs early in the development cycle.

Flexibility

The framework can easily integrate with third-party APIs and services, such as payment processors, CRM systems, and analytics tools. This allows fintech applications to expand their features without needing to start from scratch.

Customization

Laravel's design allows for modular development, enabling the creation of highly customizable applications tailored to meet specific fintech business needs.

Community

The framework has a large community of developers contributing to a wealth of packages, extensive documentation, and tutorials. This reduces development hurdles by providing pre-built solutions to common challenges.

Multiple tools

Laravel offers first-party tools like Laravel Nova for building admin panels, Laravel Telescope for code debugging, Laravel Sanctum for API authentication, Laravel Pint for consistent coding standards, and Laravel Horizon for real-time monitoring and performance insights. This investment enhances the quality and speed of the development process.

Scalability

As mentioned earlier, with growing demand, a fintech app must handle loads of data, making scalability a cornerstone. For these needs, Laravel has an efficient architecture supporting microservices and RESTful API development. It also integrates with cloud and storage solutions, allowing for future fintech product scalability.

Speed

Even more than others, the fintech industry is highly competitive, and once an innovative idea or attractive offer emerges, it needs to reach the market swiftly. Rapid development is essential for such speed-demanding projects. Laravel's expressive syntax and tools such as the Eloquent ORM and Blade templating engine speed up development processes, reducing time to market for fintech products. The framework provides ready-made components like routing, authentication, and caching, allowing Laravel developers to focus on core business logic.

Trends in fintech for 2025 and how Laravel can help follow them

Choosing a robust development framework is one thing, while choosing one that is cutting-edge is another. Several trends have emerged in recent years that have shaped the fintech development landscape and are expected to continue trending. Let's see how Laravel application development meets modern requirements.

AI-powered wealth management

Integrating AI analytics in the financial industry will increasingly become a trend, helping customers efficiently manage their expenses, cryptocurrency portfolios, and taxes. Laravel can be integrated with machine learning libraries. By doing so, Laravel developers can create dashboards that provide financial advice within the app. Its MVC architecture allows for a clear separation of concerns, making data processing and analytics integration maintainable and streamlined.

Intelligent document processing

The process of Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) uses AI-based technologies to make the content of documents immediately available by extracting document information. IDP stores the original documents in a secure digital format, enhancing the security of the application. Laravel offers multiple libraries for handling different types of data formats. Intelligent document processing becomes possible with Laravel libraries such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) — they automate data extraction and validation from complex financial documents.

Buy now, pay later

This technology allows customers to make purchases immediately without paying upfront. Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) can be integrated with Laravel software through an API. It involves a few steps: first, choosing a BNPL provider, then setting up a merchant account, and finally integrating the API into the Laravel app. Popular providers include Klarna, Afterpay, Affirm, PayPal, and Sezzle.

Neobanks

Neobanks provide banking services to customers without physical offices, with all activities occurring within an application. The Laravel framework allows handling complex account management processes, creating microservice architecture, and API and third-party service integrations for building perfect neobanking applications. Laravel also supports RESTful API development, which helps connect multiple banking services.

Ecosystems dominance

Simply providing customers with financial management opportunities within neobanks will soon not be enough. Collecting multiple services under one roof — through an app — will become trendier, such as purchasing air tickets right after checking your balance. Laravel offers packages for third-party service integrations, including payment gateways, travel, and more. This allows Laravel developers to build such connected ecosystems, while the framework supports modular development and microservices architecture.

Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity of financial apps must be and is the strictest. Such measures as multiple authentication, including not only the password, but facial recognition, biometrics, and behavioral analytics will all soon become necessary security tools. Speaking of Laravel as a framework, it by default protects software from DDoS attacks, SQL injections, and CSRF attacks for web apps. As for the trends mentioned above, the framework doesn't natively provide such capabilities, but they can be integrated with third-party solutions.

Reasons for fintech to outsource Laravel development

There are multiple reasons to outsource Laravel application development. Services provided by software agencies can be tailored to any company's needs. For startups, outsourcing Laravel development provides quick access to skilled talent. Enterprises that want to outsource, for example, Laravel web development to another company, might seek to bring their web app to the market faster. Medium-sized businesses may need to expand their product with new complex features and thus outsource their engineering to skilled Laravel developers. Let's take a closer look at some of the reasons to outsource Laravel development.

Saving costs on hiring

Cost savings on hiring is a significant benefit of outsourcing for any industry, and particularly in finance. Finding developers who are proficient in Laravel and have experience in fintech can be a challenging, almost impossible task. However, there are software development companies with entire Laravel development teams. Partnering quickly with experts in the field can significantly reduce the time spent on searches and employment-related procedures and expenses.

Immediate access to diverse expertise

Apart from a Laravel development company having specialized knowledge in fintech, its members usually have diverse skills and experiences. For complex fintech projects, interdisciplinary knowledge can be very useful, and outsourcing opens up these opportunities. Developing a cryptocurrency web app is one thing, but making it a complete project requires analytics, user-side development, UI/UX design, and DevOps expertise. If you decide to outsource Laravel development, it will allow you to assemble a complete team that meets specific project demands.

Advanced technology adoption

Finding particular experts on freelance platforms, vetting their expertise, and discovering they lack the necessary skills is more challenging than working with a vendor that offers custom Laravel development and can assist with adopting certain technologies. A Laravel development team can help integrate blockchain technology for transactions and security, incorporate AI models for personalized recommendations and processes, establish microservice architecture, implement real-time data processing, and more.

Enhanced flexibility

Hiring a specialist for the company creates a commitment to responsibilities and limits the ability to scale the team up or down depending on project demands. While, outsourcing Laravel development offers flexibility — if an entrepreneur realizes they need more personnel in the application development process to quickly capture the market, they can adjust their team size more swiftly than with a full hiring cycle.

Faster time to market

With many projects underway, software development agencies often implement automation in their processes with DevOps. As a result, this approach differs from building the app creation process from scratch. Complete Laravel web development projects can move immediately into production, transitioning from development to a live environment when the processes are automated. In addition to DevOps, another benefit is having ready-made solutions. Again, a software development agency doesn't need to create features from scratch when they have standard Laravel solutions available.

Focus on core business functions

While outsourcing Laravel development to an agency, a company can focus on customer relationship management, regulatory compliance, and risk management. Regarding compliance requirements, when developing a neobanking app, it's important to build it based on locally accepted banking-as-a-service software, and typically, it's up to the client to choose the most appropriate option. A company can also focus on keeping up with new regulations and following financial laws and rules. By outsourcing Laravel development, a fintech company can also focus on customer development interviews and analytics instead.

How to recognise the right Laravel development company for outsourcing?

Here is a checklist of features that can help indicate whether a Laravel development team is the right choice.

Portfolio. Check if their portfolio includes cases of developing fintech apps with the Laravel framework. Companies usually share their expertise on their websites and social media platforms. Even for projects under an NDA, companies often find a way to share the expertise gained, like in this example of the US neobank development on Behance platform.

Technical expertise. The Laravel development company should be familiar with the latest versions of Laravel ecosystem elements, and the development outcomes should be current. You don't need to vet the company extensively if they claim Laravel as their core technology; just check former customer reviews to see if they are satisfied with the product's functionality.

Communication. This can also be checked on review platforms such as Clutch, GoodFirms, or Upwork. Typically, a software development team should update their customer every two weeks. The exact period can be customized to one week, depending on the agreement between both parties.

Accessibility. The Laravel development service should include the client's involvement in the management processes. The company should have established processes and usually adhere to one of the models, like Waterfall, Scrum, Agile, or a combination. The client should be able to see the real progress of the development online.

DevOps practices. Another factor that ensures Laravel development services are delivered as quickly as possible is the vendor's adoption of DevOps practices in their app development process. This means they automate transitions from one product development stage to another, implementing continuous integration and deployment. Usually, it's easy to determine if they implement DevOps practices; simply check the company's services page. If they offer assistance with DevOps as a service, they likely have the expertise to execute it effectively within clients' projects.

Examples of fintech app development with Laravel

To illustrate how Laravel is used in real-world fintech applications, we'll provide two cases from Ronas IT's experience.

Trading platform for the Nigerian stock market

This project is dedicated to improving asset purchases within the Nigerian stock market and enabling investments in mutual funds. Before outsourcing development, the company faced several issues with the app, including design and technical problems. A code audit recognised the need for a complete code rewrite with Laravel. The Laravel development team focused on the following to achieve the desired goal:

Code audit and rebuild. The audit included a manual code review along with automatic solutions, such as SonarQube Analysis and IntelliJ IDEA Code Inspection. The backend code had high-severity bugs, complex structures, low test coverage, and security vulnerabilities. With these issues, debugging was not an option. Rewriting the codebase in Laravel allowed for the implementation of flexible infrastructure, clear coding practices, and high automation levels.

Infrastructure and security. Since the fintech field requires additional security measures, a robust infrastructure was needed to revert to a previous version if problems arose. To enable this functionality, an “Infrastructure as Code” approach was used, allowing automatic deployment. AWS was deployed to avoid vendor lock-in, adding reliability to the partnership, meaning the Laravel development company doesn't own the code and can't block the product's progress in any way.

KYC integration. The KYC questionnaire was compiled according to Nigerian laws, which require accounting for the user's risk profile. Thus, KYC includes questions on experience with financial instruments and income level. Authentication is seamlessly supported by Laravel's integration capabilities.

The project is now in the process of app development and establishing new processes for the internal team.

Neobank for US residents

To obtain a credit card, US residents need to improve their credit rating. The idea of this neobank was to help them on this path with financial products. The flexible Laravel framework helped developers to build a stable and secure backend system with enhanced security.

Microservice architecture. The key feature of this project is the microservice architecture within Laravel, which isolates the app's processes and allows individual services to operate independently. This brought stability to the banking system, ensuring that if one service experiences issues, others continue to function without interruption.

Data privacy and security. Laravel's robust built-in security features and the use of secure third-party services like Bond for banking integrations reinforced data privacy across the application. However, in building banking applications, relying solely on built-in features is not enough. Thus, the team implemented multiple GitLab capabilities to enhance the code review process. The Laravel development team used analyzers for code quality (which comment on code formatting and potential risks), test coverage (which checks if the code is well-tested), and patch size (which controls the size of changes for easier review).

Regulatory requirements. Laravel demonstrated its ability to support regulatory compliance in fintech projects. The app was certified with SOC 2, regulating information security policies and US financial services procedures. The software also follows PCI DSS and ISO/IEC 27001 standards requirements.

The project went into production and is undergoing closed beta-testing.

How to save costs on Laravel support and maintenance with outsourcing?

These examples of how Laravel has been effectively implemented in complex fintech projects show just how important a consistent and skilled development approach is. Outsourcing Laravel development can be a game-changer when it comes to saving costs, especially on support and maintenance. By entrusting a single company with your Laravel project's development, support, and maintenance, you ensure these services continue smoothly. This approach removes the need for code rewrites when you switch vendors, as was necessary in the Nigerian project we mentioned above.

The main benefits of outsourcing include reduced costs, smooth product development, and reliable application performance. When one team handles the entire lifecycle of a project — from development to support — it keeps costs down and ensures continuity in expertise and understanding of the application, leading to a more cohesive and efficient process. Overall, outsourcing can lead to significant savings and more dependable results, making it a preferred strategy for many fintech companies using Laravel for their app development needs.

Here are the main reasons, based on Ronas IT's experience, that demonstrate how Laravel development outsourcing can save costs on maintenance and support:

Consistency. When a single company manages a project from start to finish, the team has a thorough understanding of the codebase and architecture. It results in more efficient troubleshooting and reduces the need for extensive maintenance.

Proactive monitoring. Outsourcing companies often provide proactive monitoring and regular updates. In Ronas IT's Proactive Care package potential issues are identified and addressed before they become major problems, lowering long-term maintenance costs.

Advanced tools. Outsourcing firms typically have access to advanced tools and technologies that enhance their ability to maintain software efficiently. These tools can help automate routine maintenance tasks, reducing manual effort and associated costs. For example, Ronas IT offers services like continuous integration and deployment, issue resolution within 24 hours, and monitoring systems set up with Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki.

Scalability of services. As your application grows, outsourcing companies can scale their services to match your needs without the costs associated with expanding an in-house team. This flexibility helps maintain performance without unnecessary expenses. Cost management to identify areas where savings can be achieved is a key part of Ronas IT's DevOps services.

Avoidance of code rewrites. When the same company handles both development and maintenance, there's no need for costly code rewrites that often occur when switching vendors or bringing in new teams to understand an existing codebase.

Calculating Laravel fintech project outsourcing costs

As with any app development project, the cost of custom Laravel development services depends on the number and complexity of features. Within a time and materials contract, the cost is calculated based on the hourly rate and the time spent on the project. Additionally, the cost depends on the location of the team working on the Laravel development. You can check the comparison of hourly rates in different regions in the related article. The approximate cost can be estimated before the start of the project, but only after clarifying specific details of development with the software development agency.

How to ensure you work with skilled Laravel developers?

One of the main criteria here is active usage of the framework itself. Skilled Laravel developers often create their own innovations based on the framework to achieve better functionality and faster app development. The easiest way to verify this is by visiting open-source platforms to view the development team's activity and their contributions within the Laravel community. Here are a few examples of innovative contributions from Ronas IT to Laravel:

Getting rid of repetitive actions

The Laravel-helpers by Ronas IT Laravel development team is a toolbox for developers, offering ready-made functions and tools to simplify and speed up coding tasks. Instead of writing common code from scratch, developers can use these pre-built "helpers" to perform everyday tasks, like formatting data or handling files, which saves a lot of time.

Faster development of typical tasks

The Laravel-entity-generator package allows developers to quickly set up the basic "building blocks" needed when creating new features or sections of an app. This tool automates the creation of various interconnected parts of the app, ensuring they're set up correctly and consistently, which saves time and reduces the chances of mistakes.

Automatic documentation generator

Laravel-swagger is a tool designed to automatically generate documentation for REST APIs as you run your PHPUnit tests. This means that when developers test the code to ensure it works correctly, the plugin creates detailed documentation for others to understand how your API should be used.

What does this technical information offer business owners? First, it demonstrates that the development team is continuously learning and knows the framework well enough to make meaningful contributions. Second, by innovating within the framework, they implement automation and components that speed up development, resulting in an application that reaches the market more quickly.

Conclusion

The financial industry's unique challenges, such as ensuring data security, scalability, compliance, and specialized expertise, are effectively addressed by the Laravel framework. By choosing to outsource Laravel development, fintech companies gain immediate access to skilled talent, advanced technologies, and greater flexibility, ultimately achieving faster time-to-market while concentrating on core business functions. By selecting the right development partner, financial institutions can stay ahead of evolving trends and regulatory requirements, delivering high-quality and innovative fintech solutions. If you're interested in our Laravel app development services, let us know by filling out the form below.