Building a Fintech

Whatever problem or opportunity you are trying to face, you must clearly define it before you start. It always starts with an opportunity to provide better, cheaper, or better and cheaper services to a group of customers. The opportunities may come from the current suppliers not properly delivering solutions, or not taking the opportunity to do it in a smart way, which would be a more efficient, easier or cheaper process from the consumer's point of view. Opportunities may also come from changes in the external environment, requiring new ways for a certain service or product to be deployed.

Once you realise an opportunity, it is important to access the potential size of the market. You need to define potential customers and talk to them, understand their perspectives of the problem and the opportunity, and build solutions that answering problems for customer or help deliver their dreams. It's also important to understand potential competitors and to see if similar solutions are in the market.

Many fintechs were created to provide alternatives to services that were poor or too expensive from the perspective of customers. Revolut, today a well-known fintech and Digital Bank in some countries, was created to address inefficiencies and high costs in the traditional banking and financial services industry, particularly in the areas of currency exchange, international payments, and banking accessibility. The company was founded in 2015 by Nikolay Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko, with a clear focus on leveraging technology to provide better financial services for individuals and businesses. Like the founders of Transferwise, Storonsky had noticed that banks generally charged high fees to exchange currencies, often because there was little competition. Today Revolut operates in 37 countries, offers services including multi-currency accounts, cryptocurrency trading, and stock investments. It has more than 50 million customers in 2025.

Once you find the opportunity, the first step is the assessment of the solution to solving a problem and the respective size of the market. The result of this assessment will show if an idea or solution may have an opportunity to prosper.

Before you move on your journey on creating a Fintech, you need to understand a few points:

• Minimum technical requirements
• Minimum regulatory requirements
• Dynamics of the business
• Partnerships
• Clear budget up to pilot
• Sources of funding

Unfortunately, we see many great ideas and start-ups failing because of not understanding these points.

There are many creative ways to build a fintech. You may say that building a fintech is like a game of blocks.

As a game of blocks, the architecture of a fintech is designed by decoupling, and creating blocks that represent each step in the process of delivering the solutions. A founder must understand what is core to the business and what differentiates the solution from others in the market. The solution should be developed in-house; and will often use partnerships to accelerate "go to the market". This reduces cost in parts of the process (blocks) that are seen as a "commodity", and where there is no innovation, but where these blocks are a necessary part of delivering the service or product.

Each fintech will have different solutions and requirements, depending on the market it is in, the type of business, and the solution to be sold. There is no formula or blueprint to be followed – apart from understanding the need to build something fast, focused and at an affordable cost, using innovation, technology and partners.

One point here: fintechs will often have different teams working on delivering the block that build the whole structure. These teams will work separately and simultaneously, based on the requirements and briefing provided by a project coordinator, who understands the overall picture. This type of operational model enables the business to accelerate the time to market and keeps costs under control. Like in an orchestra, the project leader is the conductor and knows how all the parts should play together.

This is a key difference from the way traditional financial institutions build solutions: they tend to do almost everything in house. Due to security or control concerns, the design works in sequence which can limit innovation and creativity. Very few organisations will have the necessary experts or resources at every stage of the process to keep up with the speed of the market in innovation, causing them to miss opportunities to improve efficiency.