Regulated markets
MVP Development for Fintech Startups
Fintech is unforgiving in a specific way. Bugs in most products annoy users; bugs in fintech move money to the wrong place and sometimes cannot be undone. The engineering standard is different and an MVP does not get a discount on it.
My background is cybersecurity research and I have built payment and financial flows across three continents. In an MVP I care most about the decisions that are expensive to reverse: how you model money, where card data lives, and whether you can prove your books are correct.
How the build runs
What is different about scoping a fintech MVP
A double-entry ledger goes in v1, always
The most common and most expensive early mistake I see is a balance column on a users table. Money needs an append-only, double-entry ledger where balance is derived rather than stored. Building one into an MVP is roughly a week. Migrating to one after you have live customers and real transaction history is a multi-month project with a correctness risk attached. There is no version of this I defer.
Card data never lands in your infrastructure
Every system that touches card data is in audit scope. I design so it is tokenised at the edge and held by the processor, which keeps your MVP almost entirely out of PCI scope. This is a structural decision made once, at the start, and it determines how heavy your first real audit is.
Every money-moving endpoint is idempotent from day one
Networks fail mid-transaction. Without idempotency keys that failure becomes a duplicate charge and a support crisis, and in an MVP with a small team a support crisis is your whole week. It costs almost nothing to build in and I treat it as a hard requirement rather than a nice-to-have.
Reconciliation is a v1 feature, not a v2 feature
You need to be able to answer whether your ledger matches the processor. Even a simple daily reconciliation job catches the class of bug that otherwise surfaces as an angry customer. Founders consistently underrate this until the first mismatch.
KYC vendor choice is scoped against 24 months, not launch
Switching identity providers later means re-verifying your entire user base, which is a genuinely bad quarter. I scope the selection against where you plan to operate, keep the integration behind an interface, and make sure the MVP is not quietly welded to one vendor's assumptions.
Scope
What a v1 looks like here, specifically
Screen counts are a starting point, not a quote. The real number comes out of the scoping week, and it is almost always lower than the brief that walked in.
10 to 16 screens
Typical v1 for a fintech product, scoped in the first week
Goes in v1
- Auth, KYC flow, and the core money-movement journey
- Append-only double-entry ledger with derived balances
- Idempotency keys on every money-moving endpoint
- Tokenised payments, with card data never touching your servers
- A daily reconciliation job against the processor
Deliberately deferred
- Multi-currency until a real customer needs the second currency
- In-house KYC or fraud scoring; use a vendor in v1
- Full admin tooling beyond what support genuinely needs on day one
- Card issuing or lending features before the core flow is proven
What you're actually buying
Scoping, the build, and launch
Week 0
Scoping: every screen counted and priced
We go through everything you think the MVP needs, screen by screen, and cut it down to what actually has to exist to test the thing you're testing. Every remaining screen gets counted and priced at $80, across whichever platform it needs — mobile, web, desktop, or Linux. You leave with a scope doc and a total, not an estimate that moves once we start.
The build
Design and development, with you seeing it every week
My Panicle Tech design and engineering team builds it, screen by screen; I own the architecture, the code review, and the calls that are expensive to get wrong. You get a working build to look at every week, not a status update. If a screen turns out to need more than was scoped once it's half-built, that gets priced honestly before it's fully built, never absorbed silently.
Launch
Handover, and two weeks of me still answering the phone
Deployed, monitored, and documented well enough that the next engineer who touches it isn't guessing. Two weeks of post-launch support are included, because the bugs that matter are the ones your first real users find, not the ones QA finds.
Why me, for this market specifically
Experience, not a capabilities deck
Plenty of teams can build screens. Fewer have shipped for Fintech specifically, been wrong about it, and had to fix it with their own name on the commit. Here's what I'm bringing.
- Cybersecurity researcher, M.Tech from NIT Kurukshetra, 30+ citations
- Payment and financial flows built across US, UAE, and India markets
- Six ventures built 0 to 1, several handling real money
- Full-stack: I design the ledger and I write it
Pricing
from $80 a screen. Counted up front.
Design and build, screen by screen, across mobile, web, desktop, and Linux. My Panicle Tech team designs and builds it; I own the architecture and the technical decisions as advisor on the project. Added screens are priced at the same rate, never renegotiated after the fact.
MVP Design & Development
from $80
per screen
- Scoping week: every screen counted and priced up front
- UI/UX design and full-stack development, screen by screen
- Built by my Panicle Tech design and engineering team
- I own the architecture, code review, and technical direction
- Mobile, web, desktop, and Linux apps, whichever the product needs
- Deployment, monitoring, and handover documentation
- Two weeks of post-launch support
- Added screens priced at the same per-screen rate, never renegotiated after the fact
- Option to continue on a fractional retainer
Questions
Fintech, specifically
Is a double-entry ledger overkill for an MVP?
It is the single thing I refuse to cut in fintech. It adds around a week to the build and it removes an entire category of future disaster. I have watched a team spend four months migrating to one with live customers on the system, and it was not a pleasant four months. At MVP stage it is cheap insurance.
Do we need to be a licensed entity before you build?
Not to build, but the licensing path shapes the architecture, so I want to know the plan during scoping. Whether you are going the BaaS-partner route or applying directly changes what the MVP needs to do. Building without that context is how teams end up rebuilding.
Can you integrate with our banking partner's API?
Yes, and I will read their documentation during the scoping week before quoting. Banking partner APIs vary enormously in quality, and an unusually awkward one can move the estimate. I would rather find that in week one than surprise you in week six.
How do you handle the fact that we cannot just move fast and break things?
By scoping fewer screens and building them properly, rather than more screens built loosely. Fintech MVPs should be narrower than other MVPs. That is the trade I will recommend on the call, and it is usually the difference between a product you can build on and one you replace.
More general questions about pricing, timeline, and what's included are answered on the main MVP development page.
Earned, Not Claimed
What the founders and teams I build with say
I had the pleasure of working with Kunal while building out my MVP and I have to say that it was pleasure to both interact and work with him and his team. As a first time founder, I had a lot of self doubt and internal ruptures, however Kunal's calm, never-say-die and never-panic attitude often helped bring me back to center. I can't vouch for him enough.
Anand Tahiliani
Founder, Debaser Technologies
I had the pleasure of working closely with Kunal during my time as a Product Manager at DhunGuru. As our CTO, Kunal and his team at Panicle Tech worked closely with me across the entire product journey, from building and launching our mobile apps to developing and maintaining our web platforms. His technical expertise, ownership, and willingness to collaborate made a real difference, and I genuinely enjoyed working with him throughout the journey.
Anirudh Joshi
Product Manager, DhunGuru
Kunal helped us architect Mosler's core platform, connecting smart lock hardware, our cloud dashboard, and PMS integrations into one reliable system. The foundation he helped design in those early days still scales with us today.
Pranav Kapoor
Co-Founder, Mosler
If you need more than a build
Already have a product, not just an MVP?
Regulated markets
Fractional CTO for Fintech Startups
For Fintech teams that already have a product and need ongoing technical leadership, not a single per-screen build.
See the Fractional CTO page for Fintech →
Building a Fintech product? Let's scope it.
Thirty minutes. Tell me what you're building, and I'll give you a straight read on the screen count and the total before anything gets built.
Book a 30-min callSend me a message