Services · Mobile app development · Fintech apps
Codeeo offers fintech app development in Chicago for the service firms that make up much of the city's financial economy: wealth managers and advisers around LaSalle Street, insurance brokers in the western suburbs, accounting practices, commercial lenders and payment startups in the West Loop. We build client onboarding, secure portals, staff workflow tools and digital wallets that respect Illinois rules on biometrics, call recording and money transmission, so clients finish paperwork on a phone and your staff stop chasing it by email.
We have no Chicago office. Our team of 80+ works remotely with Illinois clients from Dubai, Riyadh and Karachi, and discovery workshops, design reviews and demos all run by video call. The same team has delivered 200+ projects across the UAE and the US, and it brings that delivery discipline to firms whose clients expect accuracy before polish.
200+ companies across the US and the UAEFrom a first store to a listed developer
What a Chicago fintech app can include
Most financial firms in Chicago do not need a consumer super app. They need a client to open an account without printing anything, upload a tax return from a Metra seat, sign a policy change between meetings in the Loop, and see where a request stands without phoning an adviser. Behind that, staff need queues, reminders and a record that satisfies an auditor.
Illinois also shapes the build in specific ways. The Biometric Information Privacy Act governs face and fingerprint data, the state's eavesdropping law expects every party's consent before a private conversation is recorded, and money transmission is licensed by the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation. The features below are chosen and ordered around those facts, and most firms start with three or four of them before adding the rest in later releases.
New clients complete intake questionnaires, risk tolerance or suitability forms, beneficiary details and e-signatures on a phone, with identity checks and sanctions screening running in the background. Incomplete steps save automatically so a commuter can finish on the Blue Line home.
Accounts open in one sitting instead of over several emails.
We prefer the phone's own Face ID or fingerprint sign in, where biometric templates stay on the device. Where your identity vendor matches a selfie against an ID on its servers, we add the written notice, retention schedule and signed release that BIPA expects before any capture.
Fast sign in without exposing the firm to biometric claims.
Statements, tax documents, policy schedules and engagement letters in one encrypted vault, with requests for missing documents tracked against each client. Advisers see what is outstanding at a glance rather than searching inboxes.
Every document a client sends lands in the right file.
Task queues for account openings, transfers, policy changes and loan conditions, routed by team and service level. Supervisors see bottlenecks by office, which matters for firms with staff split between the Loop and suburban branches in places such as Oak Brook or Schaumburg.
Requests have an owner and a due date from the moment they arrive.
If your app records advice calls or video meetings, it asks every participant for consent up front and stores that consent with the recording. Illinois treats recording a private conversation without everyone's agreement as an offense, so this is built in rather than left to staff.
Recordings you can keep without a consent gap.
Invoice payment by ACH or card for advisory and accounting fees, premium payments for insurance clients, and stored balances for payment products. Digital wallet app development for Chicago startups adds card provisioning to Apple Pay and Google Pay and the funds controls a sponsor bank or IDFPR license requires.
Clients pay inside the app, and money is reconciled automatically.
Chicago has large Spanish speaking and Polish speaking communities, and many neighborhood financial firms serve them directly. We design screens, disclosures and notifications for each language from the start, so translated legal text is reviewed rather than machine generated at the last minute.
Clients read terms in the language they actually use.
For commercial lenders and banks serving Chicago's mid sized manufacturers, distributors and professional firms, a business view with several authorized users, dual approval for outgoing payments, loan draw requests and covenant document uploads. Controllers approve from a phone rather than waiting to reach a desk.
Business clients self serve without weakening payment controls.
Notifications built around the dates your clients actually miss: quarterly estimated tax payments, policy renewals, required minimum distributions, document expiry and unsigned forms. Each reminder links straight to the screen where the client can act, and staff can see which nudges were sent and opened.
Fewer missed deadlines and fewer reminder calls from staff.
Exportable logs of every approval, document view, consent and staff change, ready for an internal audit, a custodian's due diligence or an examination by IDFPR or a federal regulator.
Exam preparation takes days of exports, not weeks of searching.
Who this is for
Chicago's financial sector is broad: trading and clearing around LaSalle Street, insurance carriers and brokers across the suburbs, a deep base of accounting and advisory practices, and a startup scene in the West Loop and Fulton Market. Each starts from a different place. Financial services app development for a fifty year old brokerage looks nothing like a first wallet launch, so we shape the scope around where you are today. Some firms need a modern front door on systems that already work; others are building the whole product, ledger included, from nothing.
Advisory firms near the Loop often run on a custodian platform, a CRM and a pile of PDFs. We build a branded client app that pulls holdings and statements from the custodian, collects new account paperwork digitally and gives advisers a single view of open requests. Messages between clients and advisers are archived so the firm can meet its books and records duties, which keeps advice conversations off personal texting apps that regulators have penalized firms for using.
Start with onboarding and document requests; they save the most staff time.
Agencies across Cook and DuPage counties juggle quotes, renewals, certificates and claims notices across several carriers. An app that lets policyholders request a certificate, report a claim with photos and pay premiums reduces phone traffic sharply. We connect to your agency management system rather than replacing it, so producers keep working where they already are. Certificates of insurance, which contractors across the region request constantly, can be generated from approved templates without a producer touching each one.
Tax season brings a surge of document collection, engagement letters and payment requests. A practice app gives each client a checklist of what is still needed, a secure place to upload it and a way to sign and pay, which means less time spent chasing missing documents in March and April. Partners also gain a clear view of which returns are blocked on the client and which are waiting on staff, so workload across the practice can be balanced before deadlines bunch up.
Founders building a wallet, a small business lending product or a payments tool in Chicago face IDFPR money transmission licensing or a sponsor bank's diligence, and, for anything touching digital assets, registration under the new Illinois Digital Assets and Consumer Protection Act. Our fintech app developers in Chicago design the ledger, onboarding and controls those reviews examine first.
Map your licensing route before you design the first screen.
How we work together
A fixed scope first release suits most advisory, insurance and accounting firms: one client app and one staff console, delivered against a written plan. After launch, a monthly retainer covers new features, integrations and operating system updates. Startups with a longer product roadmap often prefer a dedicated team that works as an extension of their own engineers. Whichever model you pick, repositories and cloud accounts are yours from the start. Fixed scope work is priced against the written plan, and changes during the build are estimated and approved before anyone starts on them, so the budget conversation never comes as a surprise at the end.
A defined build with a deadline
We agree what the product has to do, write it down with a price and a date, and build exactly that. Changes are priced before they are made, not discovered on the invoice.
A product that keeps evolving
Named engineers who work your hours, join your standups and stay on the codebase. You direct the backlog; we own the quality of what ships.
Something live that needs looking after
A monthly block of hours for improvements, fixes and the small requests that otherwise wait months. Unused hours carry for a quarter.
Technology
Swift and Kotlin or a cross platform framework for the client app, a secure API layer, and cloud hosting with encryption and logging configured for financial data. We match the stack to your custodian, carrier or core systems and to whoever maintains the product later, whether that is your own IT team, an outside provider or us.
01Mobile
02Data and cloud
03Marketing and tracking
Timing depends on integrations and approvals more than on the number of screens.
A client portal for an advisory firm that connects to one custodian and one CRM moves much faster than a payment app waiting on IDFPR licensing or a sponsor bank's review. Biometric consent design and recorded call features add legal review time. We confirm the timeline once discovery has covered your systems and obligations, and the agreed dates go into the written scope before design starts.
Schedule a free consultation and get a written recommendation, with costs, before you commit to anything.
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