In 2026, a fintech app costs roughly 6 to 15 lakh to build in India for a payments or wallet product on a licensed partner, 12 to 30 lakh for a lending app, and 30 to 60 lakh for a banking style product. In the UK, the same products cost about £40,000 to £120,000, £60,000 to £150,000 and £150,000 to £400,000 with a local agency.
Those are the build numbers, and they are not the expensive part. The expensive part is the licence. Becoming a payment aggregator in India means showing 15 crore rupees of net worth, about £1.3 million. An authorised e-money institution in the UK needs €350,000 of capital before the FCA will approve it. Next to those, the app is a rounding error.
So the most useful sentence in this guide is this one: the cheapest fintech app is one that never holds the money. Almost every first product should run on someone else's licence, and the build-against-partner decision moves your budget more than any feature on the list.
This is a cost guide, not legal advice. Confirm your route with a regulatory lawyer before you commit money to it.
The licence costs more than the app
Here is what holding your own permissions costs, against working through a licensed partner.
| Route | India | United Kingdom |
|---|---|---|
| Collect or move payments yourself | Payment aggregator authorisation: 15 crore net worth at application, 25 crore by the end of year three | Authorised e-money institution: €350,000 initial capital, typically 6 to 12 months of FCA assessment, £25,000 to £50,000 and up in professional fees |
| Lend money yourself | An NBFC registration: 10 crore of net owned funds, required from the start for new applicants | Consumer credit authorisation from the FCA, plus the capital to lend |
| Work on a partner's licence | A payment gateway for collections; a lending service provider for a bank or NBFC under the RBI's 2025 digital lending rules | An agent of an e-money institution, or a banking as a service platform, which holds the permissions for you |
The partner route costs a revenue share or per transaction fees instead of crores and months. For a first product, or a product that is not itself a payments business, it is almost always the right one. Building the licence before you have proved the product is the most expensive mistake in this category, and we have seen founders make it in both countries.
The trade-off is real, though. A partner sets your limits, owns part of your customer experience and can change its terms. Most successful fintechs start on a partner and apply for their own permissions once volume justifies it, not before.
What it costs to build, India and the UK side by side
| Product | What it is | India | UK agency |
|---|---|---|---|
| Payments or wallet MVP | Sign-up, KYC, a balance or payment flow, history, on a gateway or e-money partner | 6 to 15 lakh, about £5,300 to £13,300 | £40,000 to £120,000 |
| Lending app | Onboarding, KYC, application, the lender's decision, loan terms, e-sign, repayment, for a regulated lender | 12 to 30 lakh, about £10,600 to £26,500 | £60,000 to £150,000 |
| Banking style app | Accounts, cards, payments and statements on a bank or banking as a service partner | 30 to 60 lakh, about £26,500 to £53,100 | £150,000 to £400,000 |
| Your own licence and rails | Holding client money, several payment rails, a full compliance function | 60 lakh and up, before the capital | £400,000 and up, before the capital |
Pound figures use 113 rupees to the pound, the rate across our cost guides. Indian figures are at a blended 16,000 rupees a person-day. UK figures are published UK agency ranges, where senior fintech engineers bill around £500 to £625 a day.
The market agrees on the shape if not the edges. Indian agencies publish 5 to 15 lakh for a basic payments app and 15 to 30 lakh for lending, each with 1 to 5 lakh of compliance work on top. Quotes that look far cheaper usually leave the compliance out; quotes far higher usually include a licence the product does not need.
Where the money goes: a worked estimate
A lending app in India that works as a lending service provider for an NBFC partner. The partner holds the licence, makes the credit decision and moves the money. The app finds borrowers, verifies them, shows the offer and services the loan.
| Work package | Person-days |
|---|---|
| Discovery with the lending partner: products, the key fact statement, data flows, what the RBI expects of a service provider | 6 |
| Design: onboarding, consent screens, the offer and key fact statement, repayment | 12 |
| Onboarding and KYC: PAN, Aadhaar eKYC or offline XML, liveness, the hand-off to video KYC | 12 |
| Consent and data: permissions asked only when needed, a consent log with an audit trail, deletion on request | 6 |
| Loan journey: application, the partner's underwriting API, offer, e-sign, e-mandate | 16 |
| Disbursal and repayment status, with money moving between the partner and the borrower directly | 8 |
| Servicing: statements, foreclosure, grievance redressal with a named officer | 8 |
| Admin and partner dashboards, and reporting | 8 |
| Security: encryption, secrets handling, logging, a test by a CERT-In empanelled auditor and the fixes | 8 |
| Testing on real devices, the partner's acceptance testing, the Play Store lending review | 7 |
| Launch and handover | 4 |
| Total | 95 |
That is about 15.2 lakh, roughly £13,500 or $18,100, over four to five months with a team of three. The same 95 days at £500 to £625 a day costs £47,500 to £59,400 with a UK agency, about four times as much.
Look at what is not in the list. There is no loan ledger, no money held, no credit model of our own, because the partner does all three. That is why the build is 15 lakh rather than 60, and it is the whole argument of this guide in one table.
Building a UK fintech with an Indian team
UK founders ask us this version of the question more than any other, so here is the honest answer.
What gets cheaper: the build. The worked estimate above costs about a quarter of what a UK agency charges, and the gap is similar for every row in the table. The fully loaded comparison, including what it takes to run a team across time zones, is in our guide to hiring developers in India.
What does not: everything regulatory. A UK product still needs UK permissions or a UK partner, whoever writes the code. The FCA fees, the e-money partner's charges, KYC checks at around £0.75 to £2.25 per customer, and your compliance officer cost the same wherever the developers sit.
What needs designing in: access to production data. Under UK GDPR, an offshore team should work on test data and reach live customer data only through controlled, logged access, if at all. Set this up in week one, not after your first security review. A partner's due diligence will ask, and so will any bank you work with.
Done that way, the arrangement works well. Done carelessly, it is the thing that fails a partner's onboarding review and costs you three months.
The running costs nobody puts in the quote
| Cost | India | United Kingdom |
|---|---|---|
| KYC per customer | 3 to 25 rupees for eKYC; 50 to 180 for a video KYC session | About £0.75 to £2.25 for a document and selfie check |
| Partner fees | Gateway charges per transaction, or the lender's fee arrangement | Per transaction and monthly platform fees, sometimes a revenue share and minimum volumes |
| Security testing | 75,000 to 2.5 lakh for a test by a CERT-In empanelled firm, repeated after major changes | Penetration testing, from a few thousand pounds a round |
| Hosting | Payment data stored in India, which in practice means an Indian cloud region | Usually a UK region, which most partners prefer |
| Maintenance | 15 to 25 percent of the build a year, as in our app maintenance guide | The same proportion, at UK rates |
| Regulatory change | A few weeks of work whenever the rules move, which in Indian lending has been most years | The same, when the FCA updates its rules |
GST at 18 percent applies to development invoices for Indian clients and is claimable as input credit if you are registered. Services exported to UK and other overseas clients carry no Indian GST.
The seven things that move a fintech quote
- Whether you hold the money. Everything else on this list is smaller.
- The product type. Payments, then lending, then banking style, in rising order of cost and of what a partner will ask of you.
- How many partners and rails. One gateway or lender is a normal first build. Each extra one adds integration, testing and a second set of rules.
- KYC depth. eKYC is cheap and quick. Video KYC, needed for some products, adds a human step, a vendor and a much higher per customer cost.
- The consent and audit trail. Lending rules in India require explicit, logged consent for the data you collect. Built from the start it is a few days of work. Added later, it means reworking every screen that touches personal data.
- Reporting to the partner and the regulator. Partners want data in their format, on their schedule.
- Security. Fintech apps get attacked more and audited more. Budget for testing twice: before launch and after the first major release.
Compliance that lands in the build
Each of these is a line in the estimate, not a policy document.
- Data localisation in India. Payment system data has to be stored in India under the RBI's 2018 direction, which rules out some hosting choices.
- Digital lending rules in India. Under the RBI's Digital Lending Directions, 2025, loan money moves directly between the lender and the borrower and never through the app company's account. The borrower sees a key fact statement before agreeing, data collection must be need-based with consent, and the lender has to report your app to the RBI.
- App store rules. Google Play only accepts personal loan apps in India that appear on the RBI's list of digital lending apps, which your lending partner reports you to, and expects the partner lenders to be named in the listing. Plan the partner's reporting before the launch date, not after.
- Strong customer authentication in the UK. Payments and account access need two factor checks, designed into the flow rather than bolted on.
- Card data. Store none. Use your partner's tokenisation so card numbers never touch your servers, which removes most of the card security standard's scope.
How to read a fintech quote
- Ask which licence the design assumes. If the answer is "ours", ask why the product cannot start on a partner's.
- Ask for the compliance lines separately. KYC, consent, audit trail, security testing. A quote without them is not comparing like with like.
- Ask who has worked with your partner's APIs before. Every gateway, lender and banking platform has its quirks, and experience saves weeks.
- Ask how production data is protected, and who on the team can reach it.
- Ask what happens when the rules change. Indian digital lending rules have moved several times since 2022. A fixed price with no change mechanism will become an argument.
- Ask for the per customer running cost, not only the build price.
The wider checklist for choosing who builds it is in how to hire a development company in India.
Questions people ask
How much does it cost to build a fintech app in India?
Six to 15 lakh for a payments or wallet app on a licensed partner, 12 to 30 lakh for a lending app, and 30 to 60 lakh for a banking style product, with Indian agencies at blended rates. The worked estimate above, a lending app for an NBFC partner, is 95 person-days and about 15.2 lakh. Holding your own licence adds crores of capital, not lakhs of development.
How much does a fintech app cost in the UK?
UK agencies publish roughly £40,000 to £120,000 for a payments MVP, £60,000 to £150,000 for a product running as an agent of a licensed firm, £150,000 to £400,000 with your own permissions, and £400,000 and up for a platform holding client money. FCA authorisation and capital requirements come on top.
Is it cheaper to build a UK fintech app in India?
The build is about a quarter of the UK price for the same work. The regulatory costs stay the same, because a UK product needs UK permissions or a UK partner whoever writes the code. Plan production data access carefully, since UK GDPR and your partner's due diligence will both ask about it.
Do I need an RBI licence for a fintech app?
Not if you work through a licensed partner. Collecting payments through a gateway, or acting as a lending service provider for a bank or NBFC, does not need your own authorisation. Becoming a payment aggregator needs 15 crore of net worth at application, and a lending NBFC needs 10 crore of net owned funds.
What does FCA authorisation cost?
The application fees are small, but the professional work to prepare an authorised e-money application commonly runs £25,000 to £50,000 or more, assessment typically takes 6 to 12 months, and an authorised e-money institution needs €350,000 of initial capital. Acting as an agent of an existing e-money institution avoids all three.
What does KYC cost per customer?
In India, 3 to 25 rupees for eKYC and 50 to 180 rupees for a video KYC session, depending on vendor and volume. In the UK, around £0.75 to £2.25 for a document and selfie check. Budget for failed checks and re-verification too, which add to the headline price.
How long does a fintech app take to build?
Three to five months for a payments or lending app on a partner, longer if the partner's own onboarding is slow, which it often is. Start the partner conversation in week one; their approval timeline, not development speed, usually sets the launch date.
Which is cheaper, a lending app or a payments app?
A payments or wallet app on a gateway is usually cheaper, because the partner handles more of the flow. A lending app adds the application journey, the key fact statement, e-sign, e-mandate and servicing, and the rules around consent and money movement are stricter.
Getting a real number
Ranges end where your partner and your product begin. We will look at what you want to launch, tell you which licence, if any, it really needs, and price the build on that route. If a partner covers it, we will say so, even though it shrinks the project.