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Fractional CTO · Fintech

Fractional CTO for fintech startups

Ship payment, lending, and ledger systems that survive audit and scale.

The case

Fintech engineering is not generic engineering.

Fintech engineering is a different sport. The architectural choices you make in month one decide whether you survive your first SOC 2 audit, your first chargeback dispute, and the moment your transaction volume jumps 10x in a week. We've shipped payment processing, ledger systems, and KYC integrations for early-stage fintech teams — and seen what breaks when those decisions are made by founders without a fintech background.

A fractional CTO with fintech experience is rare and expensive to hire full-time. Bring one in for the architectural decisions and compliance prep that matter most, scale up engineering with junior or mid-level hires once the foundation is right.

What we cover

Fintech-specific decisions we help you make

01 Ledger and reconciliation systems that drift from the source of truth
02 KYC/AML vendor evaluation and integration
03 PCI DSS scope reduction so audits do not eat engineering time
04 Webhook idempotency and exactly-once delivery patterns
05 Audit logging and SOC 2 readiness before the first enterprise customer

Tools we use in fintech

Stripe ConnectPlaidModern TreasuryPostgreSQLTemporalDatadogAWS PrivateLink

Book a call

Talk through your fintech problem.

Free 30-minute technical review. Tell us where you're stuck — we'll tell you what it takes.

Free 30-min technical review

Tell us where you're stuck. We'll tell you what it takes — honestly.

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FAQ

Fintech questions founders ask

Do you have experience with regulated payment flows? +

Yes — Stripe Connect platforms, ACH via Modern Treasury, card issuing, and lending workflows. We have implemented PCI-compliant tokenization patterns and reduced PCI scope so engineering teams do not carry compliance debt.

Can you help us pass our first SOC 2 audit? +

We can scope and implement the technical controls — audit logging, access reviews, encryption-at-rest, vendor management. We are not auditors, but we have prepared multiple companies for their Type I, and we work alongside firms like Vanta and Drata.

How do you think about ledger design? +

Double-entry, immutable, and reconciled against the payments processor on a fixed cadence. We avoid storing balances in user records — they are always derived. This is the single architectural decision that saves the most pain later.