A Scalable MVP for Fintech Data Intelligence

Case Study: Building a UK Startup

Client Overview

One of our clients is a UK-based fintech startup on a mission to solve one of the toughest challenges in financial services: providing lenders and financial institutions with a clear, accurate, and unified view of a merchant’s financial health. By consolidating transactional data from multiple payment service providers (PSPs), the fintech startup empowers smarter credit and risk decisions for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

The Challenge

At its core, the client set out to create a platform that could aggregate, normalize, and interpret complex financial data coming from multiple PSPs — such as Stripe, Worldpay, and SumUp — each with their own data models and integration requirements.

The startup needed a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that would demonstrate the power of this unified financial view while maintaining scalability, compliance, and resilience from day one.

With time and budget constraints, the UK-based startup needed a partner capable of designing not just an MVP, but a solid technical foundation for future growth.

Our Role

OceanoBe joined the project early on to lead the architecture and infrastructure design, helping build the MVP from the ground up in just eight months.

Our senior engineering team took ownership of the backend microservices, cloud infrastructure, and frontend components, working closely with the founder and distributed teams across time zones.

Key contributions included:

• Designing and implementing a microservices-based architecture using Java (11/21) and Spring Boot (2.5.x/3.3.x)
• Establishing Kafka-based asynchronous communication and REST synchronous calls
• Integrating multiple payment service providers (Stripe, Worldpay, SumUp, Dojo, Elavon, Global Payments)
• Building open banking integrations with GoCardless and Plaid
• Deploying and scaling on AWS infrastructure (EKS, S3, SQS, SNS, SES)
• Setting up CI/CD pipelines in GitLab, with automated image builds and deployment to AWS ECR
• Developing the Angular v13 frontend with NgRx for state management

Way of Working

The startup environment demanded flexibility and fast iteration, so OceanoBe adopted a hybrid delivery model inspired by Extreme Programming (XP).

We maintained daily stand-ups directly with the client, used Slack for real-time communication, and Confluence for documentation. Without a dedicated product owner or manager, OceanoBe engineers often played a dual role — technical leads and strategic partners — ensuring clarity, alignment, and progress.

Despite the distributed setup (teams in Romania and India), collaboration was seamless, maintaining high delivery velocity and consistent communication.

Technical Stack at a Glance

• Backend: Java (11/21), Spring Boot, Kafka, PostgreSQL, MongoDB
• Frontend: Angular v13, NgRx Store
• Cloud: AWS (EKS, S3, SQS, SNS, SES, ECR)
• CI/CD: GitLab Pipelines
• Monitoring: Grafana, OpenSearch
• Architecture: Microservices with event-driven and REST-based communication

Challenges & Solutions

Adapting to Business Pivots

As this business model evolved, architecture needed to stay flexible. OceanoBe’s engineering approach allowed for rapid rethinking of system components — enabling new integrations, new API endpoints, and scalable refactoring without technical disruptions.

Managing Technical Debt

Like any fast-moving startup, tech debt occasionally surfaced. The team approached strategically: small, incremental refactors during sprint cycles, and when larger redesigns were necessary, the team always kept system stability and maintainability at the core.

Optimizing Performance

One major success story came from refactoring data pipelines that initially took hours to process — reducing execution time to under 10 minutes. This optimization drastically improved the platform’s usability and real-time insight capabilities.

Results

OceanoBe helped the UK startup go from idea to MVP in eight months, building a stable, production-ready foundation for the startup’s future growth.

Our involvement extended beyond delivery: we shaped the architecture, mentored cross-functional teams, and introduced development best practices that continue to support scalability and performance today.

The client leadership praised OceanoBe’s technical ownership, adaptability, and senior-level expertise in solving complex engineering challenges.

Impact

• A fully functional, cloud-native MVP launched in under 8 months
• Scalable microservices architecture with continuous delivery
• Integrations with major PSPs and open banking APIs
• Data processing time reduced from hours to minutes
• Ongoing collaboration for architecture refactoring and scaling

Key Takeaways

This startup project demonstrated that true fintech innovation requires both speed and structure. OceanoBe’s senior developers provided the technical leadership needed to deliver rapid, high-quality results in a fast-evolving environment.

It’s a story of engineering resilience — proving that even in a startup’s dynamic reality, strong architecture and collaboration are the cornerstones of scalable fintech products.

Industry Overview

The fintech sector continues to evolve at remarkable speed, driven by digital-first banking experiences, data aggregation, and embedded finance. Startups like these represent a new wave of innovation—bridging the information gap between small and medium-sized merchants and the financial institutions that serve them.

In today’s lending landscape, data transparency and decision accuracy are key differentiators. Financial institutions increasingly rely on platforms that can connect to multiple payment service providers (PSPs), unify transactional data, and surface meaningful insights for credit and risk evaluation.

To achieve this, engineering teams must design architectures that are both resilient and composable, supporting a constantly expanding list of integrations — from card processors like Stripe and Worldpay to open banking APIs such as Plaid and GoCardless. Scalability and compliance are no longer “future goals,” but immediate technical requirements for fintechs competing in this space.

OceanoBe’s work with this UK fintech startup demonstrates how a senior engineering team can help a young fintech startup build production-grade infrastructure from day one — balancing rapid iteration with long-term system integrity.

Terms of Understanding

Microservices Architecture — A modular approach to software development where applications are structured as a collection of loosely coupled services. Each service can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently — critical for fintech platforms that must evolve rapidly without system-wide downtime.

Payment Service Provider (PSP) — A third-party company that enables businesses to accept online payments securely. Common examples include Stripe, Worldpay, and SumUp. Integrating multiple PSPs allows platforms like the one proposed by this startup to aggregate financial data from diverse sources.

Data Transformation Pipeline — A sequence of automated processes that extract, clean, and normalize data from different systems into a unified structure. In this case, this enables accurate analytics on merchant transactions, settlements, and disputes.

AWS EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) — A managed Kubernetes service that simplifies deploying, scaling, and managing containerized applications in the cloud. It supports high availability and scalability in distributed fintech systems.

CI/CD Pipeline — Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment. A DevOps practice that automates code integration, testing, and deployment — ensuring faster, safer releases for evolving fintech products.

Open Banking Integration — The use of APIs that allow financial institutions and third-party providers to securely access banking data. This enables lenders and financial platforms to offer personalized and data-driven financial services.