Data VisualizationHigh-Performance Charting Controls for Fintech App Development

Depending on the purpose, Fintech applications may have different features that make them relevant for users. For example, stock market applications usually feature high-performance technical indicators to visualize and monitor measures such as price changes and market indexes while banking applications might allow private users to track their expenses and apply for credits without having to put a foot in the bank.

Today, most complex Fintech processes like stock trading and monitoring can be done right from a mobile or web application where people invest real and large amounts of money. This is particularly supported by data visualization, which is integrated into Fintech applications using charting controls that help users to understand the story behind the numbers with the help of high-performance and interactive charts and dashboards.

So, now let’s think about it, what if today your Fintech mobile application would experience technical issues or poor performance? How do you think this would affect millions of users who rely on their banking, insurance, investment, or stock-trading apps?

In a world of 24/7 interconnected mobile and desktop applications, the performance matters but why? And how it will change the Fintech industry in today’s ever-growing world?

Key Takeaways

1. Fintech solutions use technology to improve how users interact with their financial information and transactions.
2. Developing a Fintech application requires high-performance components to process large amounts of real-time and historical financial data.
3. There are four factors that drive Fintech innovation: GPUs, programming languages, charting libraries, SaaS & BI tools.
4. High-performance charting components are the heart of Fintech applications.
5. Performance matters and is key for Fintech app development.

1. Fintech solutions use technology to improve how users interact with their financial information and transactions.

2. Developing a Fintech application requires high-performance components to process large amounts of real-time and historical financial data.

3. There are four factors that drive Fintech innovation: GPUs, programming languages, charting libraries, SaaS & BI tools.

4. High-performance charting components are the heart of Fintech applications.

5. Performance matters and is key for Fintech app development.

As the number of financial data increases, the solutions for processing this information also increase and not only in availability and number but also in the advanced capabilities that Fintech apps feature in today’s world.

Undoubless, Fintech is one of the most promising industries this year that is being supported by hundreds of new tech companies around the world that are ready to offer the best and more innovative solutions within their applications.

Fintech in the financial sector means a renovation of the products and services that end-users are used to interacting with. While other industries such as trading, investments, banking, and other financial services are experiencing an integration with technology and data visualization for a better user experience.

Today, data visualization is improving the way consumers interact with and visualize their data, and Fintech applications are here to integrate all sorts of powerful functions and present them in high-performance applications to both traditional and advanced users.

Fintech involves large volumes of data generated from thousands of different sources that include millions of daily transactions and therefore, every Fintech application development needs to employ high-performance components to allow the smooth operation of their apps. Some of these components can be charting controls that help users to visualize and interact with the financial information as it happens.

Applications integrate different data APIs available from common databases that aggregate millions and even billions of different data points that can be of the nature of e.g., banking transactions or investment portfolio information. When rendering all that massive amount of data to users, Fintech applications are in need of high-performance data visualization charts and graphs that can process information at such levels.

So, why does performance matter in Fintech app development? In Fintech, the data visualization performance matters because is what determines how fast and smoothly the charting components in the (desktop, web, or mobile) application will display millions (or billions) of real-time and historical data, which is valuable for every investor or private customer. 

For example, stock trading needs to visualize numbers and historical trends in real-time and today, Fintech applications already provide tools for data analytics that are available for investors to help them make better decisions and maximize their investment opportunities just in real-time.

In the same way, the users of these applications are all around the world and they operate the Fintech apps within their own custom settings including language, currency, and business culture. All these users are expecting to see predefined app capabilities such as the way how the data is presented, grouped, organized, or visualized in specific formats or charts/graphs.

Trading Dashboard

This is a trading dashboard that can be easily integrated into Fintech applications. The type of charts included are the Japanese Candle Sticks that display the data of the market price and the second chart is the Mountain Area used to represent the volume and the difference between low and high values.

An example of this is the enhancement of the technology of graphics cards that allow computers to process high-resolution and more advanced visualizations without compromising the performance of the device.

This, in plain English, means that Fintech innovation allows app developers to harness the technological improvements in modern devices and their components in order to create more sophisticated applications that display better data visualizations and integrate other advanced UI features, such as zooming and panning.

Fintech is only one of the industries that have been highly and positively impacted by the innovative enhancements made to data visualization.

So, what are the factors that drive innovation in Fintech? Generally speaking, the factors that drive and accelerate the innovation and implementation of Fintech, are:

• better graphic processing units,
• powerful and dynamic programming languages,
• charting libraries for almost all and most important languages and frameworks, and
• SaaS and BI tools

As you see, innovation is driven by a combination of powerful hardware and software that have not only expanded the visualization capacity of today’s financial data but it has also triggered more demanding requirements. Think about a chart or a graph, what comes to your mind?

Perhaps for non-financial readers, one of the most common graphs is a traditional bar chart like this one:

Today, some of the most advanced Fintech apps are using high-performance data visualization components that allow users to visualize highly-complex datasets. Traders and investors are positively impacted by the combination of hardware-software innovation in Fintech as it is now possible to interact with better and faster visualizations.

9 Real-Time Charts in a Dashboard

This is a real-time trading dashboard that visualizes real data from 9 different charts at the same time. Every chart visualizes 1,000 data points per second which are 9,000 data points per second in total. 

Already as they are, Fintech dashboards display a high amount of data at very high speeds but the constant growth in innovation and higher requirements from financial experts are pushing Fintech data visualization to its highest capacity.

The world’s most demanding industries are requiring highly innovative desktop, web, and mobile solutions as they value better and more accurate ways of communicating financial, banking, credit, investment, and other types of financial information to their shareholders.

All charts and dashboards contain data but not all charts and dashboards best assist managers and decision-makers in easily translating data into knowledge. For instance, a manager may be interested in reviewing multiple stock market prices at the same time.

Therefore, it is the duty of the application to deliver the performance and capabilities that solve the users’ needs, maximize the comprehension of information, and provide value to organizations, something that can only be achieved by developing applications that feature high-performance components.

A charting library is, in essence, a gallery of hundreds of charts and graphs that can be invoked within a development environment using different commands. Charting libraries are important for developers as they help them to save hundreds of hours of application development and are ready-made solutions built to fulfill the needs of the most demanding industries that need data visualization-driven applications.

When discussing charting libraries, we find two types which are commercial and open-source libraries. In general words, open-source libraries lack the high data processing, UI interactivity, and rendering performance that commercial libraries are designed for. Open-source libraries and free licenses are great for non-commercial projects and learning more about advanced data visualization.

In the cases of serious corporations that need to deliver high-end products to final users, advanced data visualization libraries are the only solution to render data at the highest performance. For such applications, libraries such as LightningChart for desktop application development and LightningChart for web and mobile development have proven to be the world’s highest-performance data visualization libraries that have marked a milestone in the industry.

Going back to our example of the manager that needs to visualize multiple financial instruments at once with live data, how would a Fintech application address the issue of visualizing multiple data sources?

Considerations:

• How many financial instruments does the manager need to visualize?
• How many data points can the Fintech application process?
• Can the Fintech app process live data?
• How much time does the data visualization take to render the data?
•  What are the technical indicators featured in the visualization?

In order to address this challenge, Fintech application developers would have to rely on a data visualization library with the best software-hardware combination.

High-performance data visualization characteristics:

• GPU-acceleration
• A massive data points rendering threshold (1M, 100M, 1B, or more)
• Responsive UI interactivity
• No downsampling allowed
• Web-GL rendering

100 Real-Time Charts in a Dashboard

This Fintech dashboard is rendering 100 different channels (charts) and every second is rendering 1,000 data points. In total, the dashboard renders 100,000 data points per second.

Every chart has an individual statistical indicator panel that shows the new stock price and the price change compared to the oldest one.

As learned, charting components or data visualizations are the heart of every Fintech application whether it’s for banking, investment, cryptocurrency, or any other financial transaction. Here, we’ll review some of the most technically demanding Fintech applications that feature high-performance data visualization components.

Kuma Capital

Kuma Capital features LightningChart’s data visualization controls for developing its foreign exchange trading application.

‘FXVolQuant’ is an application tailored to process data and transform it into an analytics and strategy platform. The application can monitor multiple live forex volatility surfaces. The application is also known for its powerful insights into the FX and FX derivatives markets.

For demanding applications such as FXVolQuant by Kuma Capital, a lightweight and high-performing charting component makes the difference at the time of visualizing data.

For organizations that work with financial data on a daily basis, it is key to provide end-users with the best experience at the same time they can still interact, visualize, and analyze millions of live data points without forgetting about the development productivity and efficiency that provides to development teams.

The FXVolQuant application showcases multiple data source channels processing live data.

Reliable Software Systems

Talking about Fintech is talking about one of the leading software companies specializing in financial markets applications. The applications from Reliable Software Systems support high-performance features for technical analysis addressed to traders who need to dive into the objective analysis of financial indicators and build statistical models based on them.

Their application FoxTrader incorporates LightningChart data visualization controls which improve the way traders view conventional charts and market profiles. For instance, by using high-performance charting controls, the FoxTrader application allows users to combine different indicators, signals, and trading strategies into one single chart or analysis.   

This allows the processing of real-time price and volume information of different financial instruments such as stocks and commodities. The FoxTrader application features low latency, accurate real-time analysis, and intuitive visual interfaces 

The FoxTrader application by Reliable Software Systems

High-performance data visualization is critical in the field of Fintech application development. Presenting financial data on desktop, web, or mobile applications requires fast solutions that are created to handle the largest amount of data points at the fastest processing times with high interactivity.

By integrating the highest-performing charting controls into your Fintech applications, developers can maximize the development time and secure to deliver of only the best-performing financial applications for end-users.

LightningChart Data Visualization Solutions are advanced data visualization libraries for .NET and JavaScript that process hundreds of charts and dashboards built to handle billions of data points in real-time that support investors and traders to have maximum control over their financial transactions and strategies.