The Challenges of Enabling Editing and Content Creation in Banking and Finance

It’s unlikely text editing is the first thing that comes to mind when you think about banking and finance apps. From customer support logs to compliance reports, financial applications rely on rich text editors (RTEs) more than you’d think. The challenge? These editors aren’t just about formatting text. Like any other application or component being integrated into a financial services solution, they need to be secure, compliant, and capable of handling sensitive data in one of the most tightly regulated industries out there. 

Developers and architects can’t just pick any off-the-shelf solution. They need an RTE that integrates with complex banking systems, meets strict regulatory standards, and keeps financial and personally identifiable data protected at every stage. 

A unique regulatory and security landscape

Applications in other sectors, like education or retail, are bound to regulatory laws, but not as tightly as a banking or finance institution. There is a unique set of rules surrounding financially related data, as there should be. However, this makes the world of regulations a very different road to navigate for financial organizations than for other businesses. 

Compliance with financial regulations

Financial institutions have to wade through a mire of laws and regulations to process so much as a single transaction with a customer. Depending on the type of finance software and where it’s used, there could be as many as eight different regulations to maintain annually. Penalties for breaking a GDPR regulation cost €20 million. Break a PCI regulation and you’re looking at up to $500,000 per breach. 

Building an app that’s compliant with these laws, and maintaining that app in production every year, is a hefty lift for most development teams in the finance sector. 

Reference table of major global and US regulations and certifications for banking and financial software

This is an enormous amount of regulation to keep up with every year, and it affects every stage of the software development life cycle. It also affects much of the software itself, from customer data consumption on the front end to transaction processing in back end services. Every ticket written for improvements, fixes, and features in finance and banking software must have some kind of compliance in mind. 

Rich text editors are no different from other software components when it comes to regulation. They need to be secure and governed internally so they’re legally compliant. 

Rich text editors are used in a variety of financial applications already, like Shopify, Salesforce, SAP, and Better Impact. These apps retain and handle sensitive customer data, chat logs with proprietary information, transaction history, and protected B2B communications, all inside their text editors. It’s critical that this information stays protected to avoid non-compliance charges and data breaches, and to protect customer and institutional information. 

Storing large blobs of text in a database is enough of a hassle for development teams in the first place, let alone doing it compliantly. Whatever sensitive information is entered on the front end likely has to be read, split apart, and encrypted before it’s sent along its way to somewhere like a data lake or relational database. 

Auditing text based content quickly and easily is an unachievable dream for most large financial institutions. Financial institutions are more frequently burdened with managing legacy core application issues than the need to check the compliance of the text-based information being passed around the inner workings of the company’s data pipelines. As legacy problems continue to beget new problems in much of banking software, there is even more need for secure software components that don’t have to be built from scratch. 

Security and data protection considerations

What exactly are the risks in content creation in financial applications? It’s all well and good to assume bad actors are after transaction data, card numbers, and identity information, but there’s more risk online than just the obvious. Hackers are also after any information they can get that will lead to an opening in an application or an account, and that includes aforementioned data like customer chat logs, proprietary software vulnerabilities, internal communications with sensitive company data, and more. 

All of the data that gets typed into a rich text editor in these applications is also vulnerable to phishing and unauthorized access. Common front-end attacks like Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF), HTML script injections, clickjacking, and data leakage are just a few of the possible ways that bad actors can infect applications or steal information. 

The possibilities for a data breach are never ending, and costly. For example, Slim CD, a Florida-based payment processor, experienced a breach that went undetected for 5 months. The attack vector was a third party system, and the result of customer PII data being exposed led to significant reputational and financial losses for the company. 

And it isn’t just smaller financial institutions, either. According to an analysis done by SecurityScorecard, third-party breaches were reported by 97% of the top U.S. banks in 2024.

These vulnerabilities and ever-increasing attacks on financial and banking applications make secure handling of text editor content more important than ever. An application is only as strong as its weakest component. To keep your app secure, you’ll want a SOC2 compliant rich text editor that has access control, advanced encryption, and redaction capabilities. 

Integrating a text editor into a complex tech stack

Financial and banking applications are already complex enough as is, to write new components for them is another beast entirely. Integrating a text editor into a complicated application ecosystem like a banking app has its challenges. Some text editors take years to integrate due to lack of support support, because they take a lot of configuration to integrate, or because they lack necessary features that need to be created as a custom addition. As with any component, adding custom code to an existing code base runs the risk of increasing the potential risk surface of the application.

Compatibility with legacy and modern banking systems

Many banking and financial institutions have been around for decades, which means that the foundational architecture of these applications can be ancient by today’s technological standards. Some systems in legacy banks ,credit card companies, and insurance providers still run on architecture from the 1980s and 1990s. This makes updating applications for a modern audience while maintaining existing back end infrastructure quite challenging. 

Developing shiny new front-end features for any working app can create more technical debt. Adding new dependencies becomes a puzzle of time and compatibility, and meeting necessary requirements from product managers and business partners is a repeated cycle of frustration. 

There’s also passing information from a text editing component to a database to consider. New API calls, JSON objects, and data types must all be integrated into any internal financial systems no matter whether the technology is new or legacy. Compatibility between these systems is an achievement of development, not an expectation. 

Performance and scalability in high-volume applications

Integrating an unsupported RTE into your application doesn’t sound so scary. After all, it wouldn’t be the first unsupported open source software that’s ever been integrated into financial software. For high-volume applications, however, there’s also a higher risk of poor performance. 

Many banking apps are high volume because they are critical to the everyday lives of their customers. If a transaction can’t go through at the grocery store because a customer’s account information wasn’t saved after a support chat, software incompatibility between the banking system and the RTE becomes a much bigger problem. Text editors should never hinder or slow down critical, real-world financial interactions.

If your banking application needs a rich text editor, it will be important to implement one that is lightweight and fast. The RTE must be capable of sending critical data to the back end quickly, even in high-volume scenarios, and it must be inherently ready to scale when needed. The more consumers expect convenience from their everyday applications, the more performance matters. 

User experience challenges in finance-focused applications

Regulation and integration are their own challenges. What about the user experience? Depending on the type of finance-related app, users need a number of different features from a rich text editor. If the integrated editor is too simple, development teams can end up spending too much time custom coding a feature, which leads to dissatisfied stakeholders. Having a text editor that’s already feature-rich and tailor-made for finance and banking apps makes it easier to add what users need. 

Tailoring RTE features for financial workflows

Whether you’re building or buying, there are several rich text editor features that are necessary in banking and finance web apps to increase compliance, secure access, and process complex financial data. 

• Standardized documentation with secure access: Complying with regulatory requirements is a lot easier when everything is templatized. Legal documentation, financial reports, annual shareholder records, and other important standardized documentation can become read-only templates that employees can simply fill out. Merge tags are quick reusable data references. No need to format every time. 
• Complex equations: Financial data has never been accused of being simple math. From risk management calculations to annual revenue to gross revenue to year-over-year revenue to operating expenses and so much, much more, there are a vast number of calculations required to keep banks and financial institutions going. If a rich text editor has the ability to process complex math equations in LaTex or MathML, it’s a lot easier to create accurate reports with the right equations.  
• Accessibility: Accessibility can be an important part of compliance for banks, so any customer can access their information. Having a built-in accessibility checker in your text editor is extremely helpful. 

Traditional rich text editors that aren’t as feature-rich can’t support compliance needs, secure access, or complex equations may not be an ideal solution for financial institutions. It is much more ideal to have an RTE that is tailored to a financial workflow.

Usability for diverse financial professionals

Another big challenge for financial applications is usability. There are so many different professionals in different roles across the institution that need access to critical information to do their job. From analysts to advisors to risk analysts to stakeholders to customers, a dozen different roles could touch the same information during a work day. The text editor digesting that information needs to be intuitive for professionals across a range of roles. 

This includes global support, since thousands of banking institutions serve their customers globally, while some may serve local populations with varying language needs. Localization in a rich text editor is critical for worldwide companies. 

Tools like AI translation in the RTE are also invaluable for creating multilingual content across every role. Whether users are accessing account information from their mobile or desktop browser around the world, no matter their role, any RTE integrated into a financial web application needs to be feature-rich and capable of handling content in any country. 

Maintaining content integrity and auditability

Banking institutions are no stranger to audits. At the least, there’s an annual process in place to handle them and an entire team (or person) dedicated to making sure the organization passes annual audits. It is possible to make audits easier on the teams handling them through solutions like version tracking and access restrictions inside the RTE where they’re entering reports.  

Version control and content traceability

A feature-rich text editor will track revision history that allows authorized users to view who worked on content, when, and what the differences were. If a number changes in a document and it doesn’t seem right, revision history makes it easy to view the report and find out when the error happened. This not only ensures transparency in financial reports, analyses, and customer communications but also creates easy traceability if it’s necessary during an audit. 

Preventing unauthorized content changes

One of the strongest fraud prevention tactics is role-based access control (RBAC). If you’re building it or buying it, it’s essential to have a rich text editor with role-based permissions so you never have to worry about unauthorized edits. Financial reports and statements are especially susceptible to long-term fraud via small adjustments over time, so accountability is critical for text editors in finance apps. 

The decision-making process: Choosing the right RTE for banking applications

There’s a lot to take into account when choosing the right rich text editor for a web application for a financial institution. It’s not simple to choose the right rich text editor for your application, nor is it easy to build a feature-rich one from scratch. Picking the RTE that works for all the different roles in your organization, has all the features you need, and is compliant, is a difficult decision. 

Conclusion

Adding a rich text editor to a banking or financial app isn’t just another request from a product manager on the development checklist. It’s a decision that impacts security, compliance, and usability at every level. Software architects and engineers must think beyond text formatting and consider how a text editor: 

• Handles sensitive data
• Integrates with legacy systems
• Stands up to strict financial regulations

The wrong choice can lead to security vulnerabilities, compliance failures, and frustrated users. That’s why it’s critical to evaluate RTE solutions with security, compliance and long-term scalability in mind. A text editor in a financial app is not basic. It’s a crucial component that must be as reliable as the rest of the system.

Text editing might seem like a small feature, but in banking and finance, every detail matters. Treating RTE integration as a business-critical decision instead of just another tech implementation will help keep financial applications secure, compliant, and built to last.