4 days ago
Five Lessons From Scaling A Fintech Platform In A Regulated Industry
Kevin Meyer , Founding Engineer at Pure (YC W23), a fintech platform for precious metals. Dual degrees in CS & Economics. getty
In fintech, speed is often treated as the ultimate currency. But in regulated sectors like physical asset trading, speed without trust is meaningless, or worse, dangerous. Startups entering these markets often underestimate the complexity of compliance, auditability and institutional expectations. Moving fast is easy. Moving fast safely is where the real challenge begins.
Over the past year, I've helped build a trading platform for physical precious metals—a niche where compliance isn't optional and infrastructure must be bulletproof. The platform has since processed over $200 million in transactions and serves more than 3,500 businesses, ranging from individual traders to institutional clients. Along the way, we've learned what it takes to move quickly without breaking the trust that's critical in regulated environments.
Here are five lessons that may serve other engineers, founders and product leaders building in similarly high-stakes spaces.
Startups often treat compliance like a tax—something to pay later. In regulated industries, that strategy fails. Compliance must be designed into the product architecture from the start.
For us, that meant implementing real-time identity verification through a KYC/KYB integration using Footprint. It also meant building a fully automated ledger system from the beginning, so that every transaction was auditable, compliant and reconciled, without manual intervention. Those early investments saved us hundreds of hours in operations and eliminated regulatory blind spots as we scaled.
Takeaway: If compliance is blocking your roadmap, it's already too late. Build it in; don't bolt it on. 2. Speed is worthless without stability.
Shipping fast is meaningless if your platform can't handle real-world complexity. Too many teams confuse velocity with fragility, pushing features quickly, then burning time fixing avoidable outages.
We invested heavily in core infrastructure, cutting query times by 60% and tripling system throughput. These improvements enabled us to scale transaction volume from $7 million to $22 million per month in just five months, without sacrificing uptime or responsiveness.
Takeaway: Move fast, but only on systems engineered to hold the weight. 3. Transparency beats hand-holding.
In high-value markets, users don't want to call an account rep to ask about fees. They want clarity upfront. So we built a tier-based pricing engine with live updates, letting customers see real-time rates based on their account level. That reduced friction in onboarding and built confidence among institutional users.
Transparency isn't just a UX detail—it's a trust multiplier.
Takeaway: In regulated environments, clarity is more valuable than persuasion. 4. Developer speed starts with good architecture.
Compliance demands don't have to kill agility, if you get the architecture right. Applying large-scale engineering practices (inspired in part by my time at Google) helped us move quickly without skipping testing, observability or documentation.
We cut development time by 30% while increasing platform reliability, not through heroism, but through systems thinking.
Takeaway: Fast teams aren't reckless. They just operate on better rails. 5. Compliance can be a competitive edge.
Treating compliance as a feature, not a burden, became one of our greatest advantages. It helped us win institutional clients, pass diligence with ease and maintain a high-trust posture as we scaled past 3,500 organizations and $200 million in volume.
Many platforms avoid regulated markets because they seem slow. But with the right mindset, those same constraints can become defensible moats.
Takeaway: In fintech, trust compounds, and trust starts with infrastructure.
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