The challenge
The team had scoped a 5-month MVP that included a custom ledger and in-house KYC pipeline, on top of the core payments product, a plan that would have consumed most of their seed runway before reaching a single paying customer.
Our approach
I ran a scoping audit against regulatory posture, money-movement path, and build-vs-buy for every component. We moved ledger, KYC, and transaction monitoring onto their existing BaaS partner, and concentrated all in-house engineering effort on the one flow competitors weren't offering: a real-time merchant reconciliation dashboard.
The outcome
The rescoped MVP shipped in 9 weeks instead of 5 months. The team signed their first paying merchants within three months of launch, citing the reconciliation dashboard specifically as the reason they switched from an incumbent competitor.