How to Leverage Fintech Localization for Building Trust Across Markets

What is fintech localization

Fintech localization is a strategic effort to adapt financial software and services to match the languages, cultural preferences, and regulations of a new market. 

It goes beyond translation. This process reimagines the product in a whole new light—from the user interface and payment methods to messaging and brand positioning. 

The goal: Create financial experiences that feel native to local users and comply with legal frameworks. 

As a result, fintech brands can build trust and drive adoption across different markets in a bid to expand globally. 

Why should fintech brands invest in localization

Go to any part of the world, and you’ll notice that people handle money differently. You can't make one fintech product that works the same way everywhere.

If you want to scale your financial business globally, you need a localization strategy. Let's explore why. 

Deliver a seamless customer experience 

A disconnected and confusing user experience can break people’s trust in your product. 

Think about it. A payment app that doesn’t show local currency or give language options will frustrate users. 

When you localize the entire customer journey—and frustrate users, you can remove friction and create a seamless experience. 

The payoff? Better conversions, faster adoption, and higher customer satisfaction. When your software meets users’ needs intuitively, they’re likely to stick around for long. 

Maintain a consistent voice across markets 

Speaking the customer’s native language is vital to building a customer-centric brand. 

This starts with financial translations. Global fintech brands tailor their apps, online content, and all other communications in multiple languages. 

Yet translation is only the first step. 

There are considerable cultural differences in personal finance, along with regulatory and legal differences in different countries. That’s why it’s also crucial to fully localize content for each target audience.

Localization allows fintech brands to express their identity in a way that resonates with local users. It makes you culturally relevant and creates greater appeal for your brand. 

We spoke to Neil Brennan, Content Lead at Pleo—a business expense management app, to understand this benefit. He shares:

There’s absolutely no reason why something written with a British business audience in mind would also appeal to a German business audience. A CFO in Spain will be similar to a CFO in Denmark, of course, in terms of their skills and priorities, but not quite identical.

Gain competitive advantage in emerging markets

Emerging markets offer huge opportunities. You can target gaps in local financial services and quickly one-up the local players to build a strong user base.

Localization can fuel this first-mover advantage for you. 

When you localize your product for a specific market, users will gravitate toward your platform because they feel it’s designed specifically for them. This is particularly important since financial decisions are high-trust activities.

Besides, good localization changes how people see you—from a non-recognized foreign entity to a credible brand. 

Comply with regional financial regulations

Here's where things get serious. Adhering to financial regulations is a non-negotiable part of expanding to a new market. Get this wrong, and you’re risking heavy fines or a ban from operating in this region.

With proper localization, you can adapt your entire brand to fit the legal requirements of your target market. 

In addition to translating different assets, you have to constantly monitor these regulations and keep evolving your product. 

4 fintech localization challenges to prepare for

Ready to design your localization gameplan? 

Before you go to the whiteboard, take a look at these challenges that most fintech brands struggle with. Put up safeguards for these issues to set yourself up for long-term success. 

Your code needs to work everywhere

Development teams often struggle to maintain a core codebase while supporting localized variations for each region. This can eat up a big chunk of your engineering resources.

To put this into context, think about expanding your payment platform globally. India runs on UPI, Germany loves direct bank transfers, and the US can't let go of credit cards.

Accommodating these demands goes beyond just switching up the interface. You have to rebuild your product architecture, optimize performance, and maintain security—in every localized version of your product.

Money habits are different in every culture

People's relationship with money isn't universal. It's deeply cultural and emotional.

Some cultures emphasize savings, while others focus on credit. These differences are visible in the way users interact with your platform and respond to your messaging. 

And that’s where fintech brands stumble. 

Many teams fail to understand and fulfill these behavioral nuances when localizing their products. Alongside translating your product, you have to make significant UX changes to match how locals think about their money. 

Regulations never stop changing

Financial regulations vary and evolve. 

Keeping up with these rules can feel like playing a game where the rules keep changing. 

From encryption standards and data storage to authentic methods and know-your-customer procedures, compliance needs differ starkly by location. And navigating this maze isn’t easy. 

Smart fintech brands build flexibility into their localization from day one. This lets you monitor changes in target markets and proactively adapt before regulators come knocking. 

Your resources are limited 

With limited budgets and team bandwidth, fintech companies face tough choices when deciding how to invest their localization resources.

There’s always a tradeoff:

• Should you go deep in one market or target multiple?
• Do you prioritize user experience or regulatory compliance?
• Should you choose an automated translation tool or human experts?

These resource limitations become even more challenging as you add more countries to your roadmap.

How fintech brands should approach localization

Localization is a critical growth engine for fintech companies worldwide.

Let's break down the foundational steps for building your fintech localization setup while tackling all the challenges that come your way.

Study your target market

Understanding your target market is an obvious place to start. The key here is to focus your efforts in the right areas. 

Sure, country and language requirements matter. 

But who exactly are you talking to? Their age, income level, tech comfort, and financial habits will shape everything you do next.

Maybe you’re appealing to people with a lot of disposable income, or maybe you’re targeting those with limited financial means who need a short-term loan. Both approaches need careful consideration.

By incorporating software internationalization, fintechs can better navigate local regulations and user expectations. This creates a smoother entry into diverse markets.

Here’s an example of market research in action. 

If your customers are younger people in emerging markets in certain African nations, you don’t need to set up a brick-and-mortar location. This audience has grown up trusting companies that they interact with solely through mobile phones.

However, if you’re entering countries in Southern or Eastern Europe, it’s better to focus on a traditional computer-based web presence. These are typically tougher markets for fintechs because they’re more traditional with well-established banking brands.

Define and prioritize assets to translate

After wrapping up your market research efforts, make a list of all possible assets to be translated. Then, categorize these assets into different levels of priority. 

Let’s cover a few main types of assets for translation. 

Compliance information

As a fintech brand, your first priority should be making compliance a critical part of your organization. 

Without it, you might not retain a license to offer financial services. If you get it wrong, you will attract unwanted attention from local, national, and global regulators and watchdogs. 

So, translate and tailor your regulatory disclosures, terms of service, and privacy policies in line with local financial regulations.

Financial terminology

Edit the microcopy and language within your product to match the financial terminology used locally. 

Pay attention to financial concepts and capture user language in your target markets. For example, American "checking accounts" become "current accounts" in the UK. And terms like "stocks," "bonds," and "mutual funds" have different meanings. 

So, you have to replicate the language and terms people prefer using in your target market.

Marketing and support 

Marketing and support content should be translated once there is a solid legal foundation to operate in a country.

A lot of assets come under this category, such as:

• Website and landing pages
• Email and video content
• Help documentation
• Video tutorials 

Recreate these assets based on their level of importance to your customers. 

Neil Brennan, Content Lead at Pleo, shares his company’s process: 

Our marketing managers look at the blogs, ebooks, newsletters, or website projects that the content team produces in English and make a call about what they need for their market. We have Notion boards that offer a good roadmap of the content and assets currently in the works, although, in a fast-paced scale-up, there are always a few surprise projects that crop up.

What’s the best type of translation?

Regulation and compliance leave no room for ambiguity. 

Your translated content must be 100% correct to the letter of the law. This requirement informs the type of translation you need to use. 

The main thing you want to determine is the process for each kind of communication. This chart outlines five different types of translation and where they can be used most effectively.

You can do a lot with machine translation (MT). However, for important regulatory material, consider using only premium human translation involving subject matter experts.

Transcreation, or adapting content so that its creative meaning stays intact even if it is not a direct translation, is usually the most expensive option. Transcreation is solely delivered by professional linguists and copywriters, who give you the best results for your creative marketing and advertising campaigns.

Choose the right localization technology

Managing the many moving parts of your localization strategy can be tricky. You need a streamlined platform that keeps everyone on the same page and simplifies coordination between multiple stakeholders.

Your localization tech stack will probably include a variety of tools, such as a translation management system (TMS), that meet different needs. 

To choose the right fintech localization tool, create a must-have features list, compare options online, and make an informed decision based on these decisive factors. 

Scalability

When you expand into more markets, your localization needs will grow exponentially and likely become more complex.

Your tech stack has to support this growth and scale smoothly for different needs—from app interfaces to legal documents, marketing content, and more. More importantly, an ideal platform can handle this growing demand without proportionally increasing management overhead or costs.

That’s where Lokalise comes in clutch. 

Lokalise offers a fully scalable solution with the flexibility to keep pace with its fast-growing partners. 

Since switching to Lokalise, Revolut—one of the most successful UK fintech startups—has already added 30 new languages and continues to expand. Edward Cooper, Head of Mobile at Revolut, shares how Lokalise has contributed to this growth.

With Lokalise, we could upload all our files, upload the images, and quickly check and fix everything. We could also quickly write scripts so that our developers could easily upload and download the latest files without even having to necessarily log in to the tool."

Security 

Security is the most critical component in a fintech platform. Your localization system must have a strong security framework to handle sensitive content and eliminate vulnerabilities.

Check every platform’s security capabilities like:

• End-to-end encryption
• Role-based access controls
• Compliance with financial standards

More importantly, look for the ability to mask personally identifiable information (PII) to translate your content without compromising privacy. 

API integration

Modern fintech development moves fast. And your localization tech should keep pace with it. 

That’s why you need to integrate these tools directly into your development workflows using API connections. A good platform will allow you to connect your code repositories, content management systems, and customer support platforms via API. 

This creates a continuous localization cycle with real-time translation for all assets. 

Akshat Mittal, Revolut’s Head of Localization, shares how API integrations on Lokalise have helped them bring everyone on the same page:

Though we've been using Lokalise for a long time, what's changed is that we’ve tripled our team and increased the volume of content we process exponentially. The flexibility of Lokalise enables us to integrate everyone into the localization pipeline and has made it possible to increase the speed of rolling out to new markets.

Build a quality assurance function

The high stakes in the fintech industry mean you can't afford to skimp on quality.

Quality assurance is about providing the most accurate and high-quality content for your audience and use case. Every piece of content must go through some level of quality assurance before it goes to the consumer.

Regulatory content and brand messaging need different QA approaches:

• Regulatory: Use the right translation tech and stay current with changing rules
• Brand: Nail the tone of voice, so you connect with your audience

You also may need to adjust your QA guidelines for different territories. For example, you might use more formal translations in Germany than you do in the UK to reflect the more formal speaking style there.

Or, content might need to be worded differently based on your target demographic, such as using more current slang and social references to attract a younger audience. Your language service provider (LSP) should address this and be part of your journey.

Our recommended best practices to grow with localization

Before you go off to the races with your localization plan, check out these best practices to get the most out of your efforts. 

1. Centralize your localization setup 

Centralizing your localization program allows you to effectively use all resources, knowledge, and investment. 

With a centralized infrastructure, you get seamless end-to-end service using the same tech, the same processes from an account management standpoint, and even the same people.

Besides, a centralized platform becomes your single source of truth with everything in one place, be it translation memories or glossaries. 

2. Build automation into your localization pipeline

Manual processes can only take you so far in your localization efforts. 

Between managing different wireframes, support docs variations, and other assets, things can start falling through the cracks as you scale. 

Build automated workflows from day one to:

• Simplify task allocation to each member
• Automatically extract content from different assets
• Create multiple quality checkpoints to increase consistency
• Synchronize the delivery of translated content in source platforms 

Revolut relies on a set of automations within Lokalise to translate content at a massive volume of 60K words per day in 22 languages. 

Akshat Mittal, Head of Localization, reveals how automation is a critical part of the process:

Without automated task creation and assignment, we would need a bigger team to deal with this part alone. Plus, the way assigning is done now probably wouldn't even be possible manually. Automation provides many benefits, including scalability and better content distribution. If you're producing a high content volume, automation is a must-have to meet tight deadlines.

3. Integrate localization into your development cycle

Leaving localization as an afterthought = Lengthy delays, quality issues, and multiple inefficiencies.

Instead, fast-moving fintech companies design with internationalization in mind from the start. They build localization directly into their development process. 

Implementing a continuous localization process that runs parallel to your development cycle can prevent roadblocks in the traditional approach.

4. Provide visual context for translators

There’s no room for ambiguity when localizing a fintech solution.

Your translators need to understand exactly where and how their translations will appear in your app or website. Without this context, they might create technically correct translations that feel awkward or confusing in the actual interface.

As a best practice, provide screenshots or wireframes of your product’s interface. You can also annotate UI locations for each text element and add character limits. 

GoCrypto, a cryptocurrency payment network, specifically emphasized this point in their selection criteria for localization tools. 

Aleš Ruter, Chief Creative Officer, notes that seeing the actual screens was "a big factor" in their translation quality.

Lokalise allows you to upload wireframes and pictures. That was a big factor because the translator needs to see what the translation of an individual screen is all about. You simply have to see it. We would recommend Lokalise to anyone who is trying to enter different markets or working with different languages, no matter the product.

Gain local trust for global growth with fintech localization

Fintech localization is a non-negotiable component in your international expansion strategy. 

You’ll face many barriers when entering a new market, like financial behaviors, cultural nuances, and compliance regulations.

A good localization strategy can turn these barriers into bridges to fuel your growth. Adapt your product, messaging, and everything about your brand to become a financial platform people can trust. 

Many industry-leading financial brands are doing this with Lokalise. Sign up today to see for yourself.