Dániel Balla, Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Bitrise, delivered a talk at Money20/20 highlighting the strategic importance of mobile app development in fintech. He emphasized that mobile isn't just a channel but a battleground where consumers judge financial services by high standards set by social media platforms. Fintechs often underestimate mobile development, focusing on compliance and governance at the cost of speed and user experience, resulting in a significant drop-off of users. Balla's research shows that releasing updates weekly can increase user engagement by 80%, but hitting that cadence is challenging due to unique constraints such as faulty releases not being easily roll-backed and security and compliance reviews often blocking releases for weeks or months. To fix the broken process, fintechs should ask themselves three questions: what's stopping them from releasing every other week, how confident are they in their testing strategy, and are they treating their app like a competitive differentiator? Balla advocates for investing in platform engineering teams to automate and standardize release processes, which can integrate security into the development lifecycle, automate repetitive tasks, and create a feedback-rich environment that accelerates innovation. By rethinking their app release strategy from the inside out, fintechs must start treating mobile as a core competitive differentiator to avoid getting left behind in the mobile-first economy.