FinTech Consulting

By separating what is genuinely differentiating from what is merely required. Card issuing, identity verification, sanctions screening and core banking are mature vendor categories where building in-house is usually eighteen months spent arriving where a provider already is. Building is justified where the workflow or decisioning is specific to your business model. We also cost ongoing ownership rather than initial delivery, because build decisions most often turn out badly on the maintenance and compliance-update side, not the first release.

Yes, and it is one of the most common engagements. We look at the money model and ledger design, idempotency and failure handling, reconciliation, the audit trail, scaling limits and security posture. The output is a ranked list of what is genuinely a risk versus what is merely untidy — a distinction most reviews fail to make, which is why they end up ignored. We would rather hand you five things that matter than forty that do not.

We advise on the technical and architectural consequences of a regulatory position — what a given licence or partner model requires the systems to do, and what it forbids. We are not a law firm and do not give legal or licensing opinions, and we will say so plainly rather than improvise. In practice the effective arrangement is your regulatory counsel establishing the position and us translating it into architecture, controls and evidence.

Yes, and it is frequently the highest-value few weeks a client spends with us. Estimates for payment and lending work are routinely wrong in a predictable direction, because reconciliation, dispute handling, failure paths and compliance reporting get scoped as details rather than as the bulk of the work. We assess whether the proposal accounts for those, whether the integration assumptions match how the provider actually behaves, and where the timeline is likely to slip.

For an investor or acquirer: code and architecture quality, key-person and concentration risk, security posture, the state of the ledger and reconciliation, technical debt with a realistic remediation cost, and whether the team can deliver the roadmap being presented. We report what we found and what it would cost to fix, and we do not adjust findings to suit either side of a transaction.

Incrementally, with the sequence chosen so the business can transact at every point. An API layer in front of the legacy system, functionality moved outward in slices, both paths running in parallel until the old one carries no traffic. A single cut-over date for a system that moves money is a risk profile we would advise against in almost all cases, and we will say so even when a date has already been announced.

Most run two to four weeks depending on the size of the estate and how many people need interviewing. Cost depends on scope and duration and is agreed in writing before work begins — we scope against a specific question rather than selling a fixed package. If a short conversation would resolve the question, we will tell you that instead of proposing an engagement.

No. Deliverables are written to be executed by any competent team, and clients regularly take them to their internal engineers or another partner. That is a legitimate and expected outcome. If you do want us to implement, it is a separate commercial conversation held after the assessment rather than bundled into it.