How Development Process Automation Reduces Risks in Financial Mobile Products

In the financial and insurance sectors, mobile applications have become a primary customer touchpoint, and their reliability is now a critical factor in a company’s operational resilience. Any error in a mobile product can lead not only to a decline in user experience but also to financial losses, regulatory breaches, or disruption of mission-critical services.

The study shows that a significant share of vulnerabilities and incidents in mobile financial answers stems from human factors — errors introduced during build processes, manual testing, and feature deployment. This underscores the importance of systematic development process automation as a tool for reducing operational and regulatory risks.

As pressure intensifies, mobile architectures become more complex, and expectations for code quality and transparency grow, automation is turning into a strategic component of technology risk management.

— an Android engineer with more than five years of experience, a speaker at Android Academy Global, and a published author at ProAndroidDev and Droidcon — discusses how automation transforms the quality of mobile products, supports compliance, and reduces the likelihood of critical production incidents.

1. Why has automation become critically significant for mobile products in fintech and insurtech today?

For most banks and insurers, mobile apps have effectively become the primary channel for customer interaction.  Claims submissions, payments, policy changes, and onboarding — nahead all key operations now run through Android and iOS clients. This means that every mobile release effectively introduces a change to a highly regulated, business-critical system.

At the identical time, regulatory pressure on operational resilience (i.e. the Digital Operational Resilience Act — in the EU, or from the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK) and a history of mobile banking incidents mean that “move quick and break things” is simply not acceptable.

In this environment, automation becomes the mechanism that allows teams to reconcile delivery speed with securety and stability requirements. CI/CD pipelines ensure reproducible builds, while automated tests, static analysis tools and security scanners assist detect defects and vulnerabilities before they reach real user devices.

Engineering practices, such as staged rollouts, can assist turn risky, large-bang launches into controlled experiments, so we can keep shipping rapidly without gambling with production.

2. What types of risks most commonly arise in financial mobile applications, and which of these are most strongly reduced through automation?

The risks I most often view fall into four buckets: functional issues around money flows (failed payments, incorrect premiums, stuck claims), security and privacy difficultys (fragile storage, unsecure networking), availability issues (crashes or outages at peak times), and compliance gaps (missing consent, wrong disclosures, logging or retention mistakes). Studies on mobile banking apps repeatedly show that code-quality difficultys and fragile manual processes are a major source of such incidents.

Automation is strongest at reducing regression, security, and operational risks. On Android in particular, that means unit, integration and end-to-end tests running on every change; static analysis and security checks flagging hard-coded secrets or unsecure storage; and automated scanning of dependencies and permissions to identify known vulnerabilities or licensing issues. All of these automation tools, especially when used in combination with each other, greatly lower the chance of a “faulty” build reaching customers.

3. Which development processes are most frequently automated by teams working on financial products?

The begining point is usually a solid CI/CD pipeline. Most teams adopt a lighter, quicker set of tests and checks for each pull request, complemented by a full, comprehensive suite that runs daily or on release builds. The latter would typically have the most coverage and include all available checks. While it’s acceptable to omit some of them for pull requests to maintain speed, for applications in regulated industries, it is critical to ensure production builds pass all of the required tests and verification — if any of them fail, the pipeline must not promote the artefact.

Further improvements often include automatic dependency updates, scanning for vulnerabilities, secret-detection and automations for code-signing and release management and should be gradually incorporated as the team and product mature.

4. How does automation assist reduce regulatory and compliance risks in insurance and financial applications?

Regulators increasingly expect not only that firms maintain internal policies, but that these policies are applied consistently — and can be demonstrably proven.  Frameworks like DORA and national rules on operational resilience all push firms towards continuous risk management and demonstrable recovery capability. Automation fits this trend naturally, because pipelines create an exact audit trail of what was built, which checks ran, and who approved which step.

By introducing automated steps, it becomes possible to embed compliance rules directly as pipeline checks. Even user-facing elements, such as consent flows, disclosures, and strong-customer-authentication requirements, become testable artefacts via UI and contract tests. For each release, all related build artefacts, test reports, security-scan results and logs can be archived and securely kept. This means that, if requested by auditors, the company would be able to provide undisputable evidence that confirms the company adheres to the latest requirements and recommendations.

5. How does strong architectural discipline shape the long-term resilience of financial mobile apps as they expand across multiple teams and international markets?

Automation delivers the most value when the app’s architecture supports it. A modular, domain-driven Android architecture with clear boundaries between identity, payments, policies, claims, and shared foundations like networking, analytics, and security allows developers to reason about each area in isolation. More significantly, this enables the team to write unit tests for each domain or area so that even before combining and integrating them with each other one would know that they work as they should. Isolation also assists limit the “blast radius” of changes: updating a flow related to claims shouldn’t threaten login or payments if those domains are decoupled.

As the app expands into more markets, architecture becomes the main tool for handling complexity and regulatory variation. A thin, shared “core” can encode global behaviours (security posture, logging, error handling), while country or region modules encapsulate local products, flows, and legal requirements. Combined with automation, this lets teams roll out features per market, attach diverse test suites or compliance checks where needed, and gate specific countries behind extra approvals – without forking the codebase. For Android, in particular, this is made easier by the build system’s built-in support for build flavours and variants.

6. Which tools or approaches have proven most valuable when building mobile infrastructure?

From my experience, the largegest success factor is treating mobile infrastructure as a product with ownership, a roadmap, and SLAs, not as a side task. Unfortunately, CI/CD and build infrastructure can often be disregarded as they are not something that would immediately enable a company to grow or generate revenue. It is critical for engineers, especially those in a leading role, to be able to articulate the risks and explain the long-term benefits of such an approach to stakeholders and enable the prioritisation and investment in mobile infrastructure.

Once that mindset is in place, a few technical pillars consistently pay off: robust CI runners tuned for Android and excellent observability that ties crashes, performance, and key business metrics back to specific releases and feature flags. Feature-flagging and staged rollouts have been proven to be particularly effective  — they enable teams to ship code quick, while progressively enabling risky flows, and having the ability to react rapidly to incidents without waiting for a new store release and for users to download it.

7. Looking ahead, what is the next major step in mobile process automation for the financial industry?

In comparison to other disciplines, such as backend or web, mobile is diverse in the sense that making a change to a production build is much more hard because any change has to go through the corresponding store review process (which can take up to a few days in some cases). Another hardy is that mobile app updates have to be downloaded by users. This significantly raises the quality bar for mobile applications.

In contrast, backend services typically run on company-controlled environments, so making changes to them is so much easier. This led to a wide adoption of extremely useful patterns, such as automatic rollbacks and hotfixes that are based on dashboards or monitoring data. There is definitely untapped potential in porting those practices from backend and web development to mobile. Pre-release checks are already in a excellent place within the mobile industry, but improving the speed at which mobile engineers can react to an incident could drastically reduce the impact that they have when they do happen.