About this Service
In fintech, the expensive mistake isn't building the wrong screen.
It's building the right screen for a product the regulator, the bank partner or the unit economics won't allow.
Most fintech roadmaps are written as if the constraints appear later. They don't. The licence you're operating under decides what onboarding can look like. The BIN sponsor decides which card features exist. The payment rails decide what "instant" means. The KYC tier decides how much a user can do before you've verified them. Design that ignores this gets redrawn twice — once by compliance, once by the partner bank.
In two weeks you get a product direction that already accounts for all of it: what to build, for whom, in what order, and what each decision costs under your actual constraints.
Week one — market and competitor read across 3–5 fintech products in your category, a map of your regulatory and partner constraints, and interviews with your team and, where possible, four of your users.
Week two — two working sessions, then the written strategy.
What we work through:
— Who the product is actually for, and which segment unit economics support
— The regulatory and licensing constraints that shape the product before design starts
— KYC tiering: what a user can do at each level, and where to place the friction
— Money movement: rails, timings, fees, and what the user is told about each
— Pricing, interchange, take rate and the behaviour each one creates
— Trust: what a financial product has to show before someone moves money through it
— The roadmap, sequenced — with what to cut named explicitly
You get:
— Written product strategy with a sequenced quarter-by-quarter roadmap
— Competitor teardown of 3–5 fintech products, flow by flow
— Core user flows and information architecture
— User personas grounded in research, not assumption
— Constraint map: regulatory, partner and technical, with design implications for each
— A "not now" list: what to stop working on, and why
— Two 90-minute working sessions plus a follow-up thread
Typical engagements: fintech product discovery, neobank and digital banking strategy, payment platform and payment gateway planning, wallet and remittance product definition, KYC and compliance flow strategy, B2B payments and payout products, embedded finance, card and BIN programme design, MVP scoping for fintech startups.
Work runs as part of U1CORE — design and engineering in one team, so the strategy comes with a realistic view of what it takes to build.
Platforms in this portfolio have processed $720M+ in production payments.
