Senior Fintech Engineering
Fintech Software That’s Audit-Ready Before The Auditor Shows Up.
PCI DSS. SOC 2 Type II. SOX. FFIEC. Custom financial software built by senior US engineers who know the standards cold, not the summary.
Banks, credit unions, payment platforms, and fintech startups work with Hoyack because we build for the QSA, the regulator, and the tech DD firm from day one. We partner with your team, review the AI-generated code before it ships, and give your compliance officer evidence instead of excuses.
In Financial Services, Code That Works Isn’t The Bar. Code That Can Prove It Works Is.
Fintech and banking software isn’t judged by whether it ships. It’s judged by whether it can hold up under a QSA assessment, a banking examiner walkthrough, a tech due diligence review, and a CISO’s security questionnaire. The gap between “the code runs” and “the code is defensible” is where most financial builds fall apart. And it’s where offshore vendors reliably fail.
Every financial codebase we’re asked to rescue has the same fingerprints. No documented secure SDLC. Production access that nobody can reconstruct an audit trail for. Cardholder data in log files. Encryption keys committed to the repo. Third-party dependencies with known CVEs that haven’t been updated in over a year. AI-generated endpoints that shipped before anyone reviewed the auth model. The team that built it couldn’t tell you what PCI requirement 3.5.1 asks for. The team that has to defend it didn’t write it. That’s why we work with your team, not around them.
Auditability isn’t a feature you bolt on before the QSA arrives. It’s a property of the codebase from the first commit. Build it in, and every audit is a lookup. Bolt it on, and every audit is a fire drill.
Here’s What Happens When Fintech Code Isn’t Built For The People Who Review It.
These are the exact failure modes we see across payment platforms, banks, and fintech startups when the assessment arrives or the regulator walks in. None of them are technical mysteries. All of them were preventable at the codebase level, months earlier.
SCENARIO 01: The PCI DSS Assessment
Your QSA Opens The Repo. The Assessment Stalls By Lunch.
Your payment platform handles cardholder data. Your Qualified Security Assessor starts the annual review. By the end of the first day they’ve documented: CHD logged in plaintext in at least three services, encryption keys committed to the repo six months ago and never rotated, no role-based access control around the payment processing path, TLS versions below current PCI requirements, and third-party libraries with known CVEs that were published before your last assessment. Your offshore vendor built it. Your compliance team is discovering it.
What Actually Happens
The assessment extends into remediation. Your acquirer is notified. Your processing volume gets restricted or suspended while you patch. Your roadmap freezes. And next year’s assessment starts with a trust deficit you have to work through.
SCENARIO 02: The Banking Regulator Exam
A Federal Examiner Walks In And Asks For
Your Vendor Management File.
The FDIC, OCC, or state banking department opens a routine safety and soundness exam. They ask for vendor management documentation, evidence that your custom platform meets FFIEC guidance on authentication and access controls, and proof of your change management process. Your offshore vendor doesn’t have SOC 2. Your codebase has no structured audit trail on privileged access. Your IT steering committee minutes don’t align with your production deploys. The examiner’s finding comes back as a Matter Requiring Attention.
What Actually Happens
Your board gets involved. Your compliance officer spends the next quarter on remediation instead of growth initiatives. Any pending applications with the regulator (new products, charter changes, M&A) slow or pause until the MRA is closed out in a follow-up exam.
SCENARIO 03: The Payment Data Breach
One Missing Authorization Check. Every Customer’s Financial Data.
Your API endpoint accepts a transaction ID and returns the record. What it never verifies is that the authenticated user has any relationship to that transaction. Someone iterates through IDs. Within an hour they’ve pulled names, payment amounts, card last-four digits, ACH routing numbers, and full transaction histories for thousands of merchants or customers. Your breach notification clock is already running. Reg P, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, and state-level data breach statutes are all in play. So is your merchant acquirer’s incident response playbook.
What Actually Happens
Regulator notification within hours. Customer notification within days. CFPB or state AG inquiry opens within weeks. Potential civil money penalties. Your acquirer restricts your settlement. And you’re explaining the gap to your Series B investors on a call nobody wanted to schedule.
SCENARIO 04: The Investor Due Diligence
The Tech DD Firm Opens The Repo. The Term Sheet
Gets Rewritten.
You’re raising Series B or selling to a strategic acquirer. The lead investor brings in a tech due diligence firm. Over three days they document: no SOC 2 Type II attestation, inconsistent IAM across environments, offshore engineers with production access through a shared account, third-party libraries with unpatched CVEs, no documented secure SDLC, and a secrets management story that consists of environment variables and hope. None of it is catastrophic. All of it is priced in.
What Actually Happens
The term sheet comes back with a valuation adjustment, a remediation holdback, or both. Three months of work and leverage evaporate. The governance you didn’t build during the build is now a line item on the cap table.
The Pattern Is Always the Same
In every scenario above, the code itself wasn’t the problem. The problem was the absence of auditability: no structured logging around privileged access, no enforced secrets management, no documented change control, no traceable identity model. Features got built. Evidence didn’t.
Most financial software is written for two users: the customer and the engineer. That’s one user short. The third user is the person reviewing the codebase six months later, whether that’s a QSA, a banking examiner, a CISO filling out a vendor questionnaire, or a tech DD firm hired by your next investor. When you build for that user from day one, every audit is a lookup. When you don’t, every audit is a rebuild.
That’s the difference between fintech code that ships and fintech code that scales. Not performance. Not features. Defensibility. And it’s built in at commit time, not at assessment time.
What Hoyack Does
We work with fintech startups, payment processors, banks, credit unions, and financial services teams who need code that’s both shippable and defensible. Every engagement is led by a senior US engineer who has shipped production financial code and read the standards they’re engineering against.
Custom Fintech Platform Development
Payment platforms, ledgers, digital banking apps, lending stacks, and embedded finance. Built with PCI DSS controls, structured audit logging, secrets management, and SOC 2 posture baked in. Your compliance team has answers. Your engineers have velocity.
Core Banking Modernization And Integration
Replace or wrap legacy cores without breaking what works. Integrate digital channels, open banking APIs, loan origination, and treasury systems. Built for banks and credit unions where change management is as important as the change itself.
PCI DSS And SOC 2 Engineering
Cardholder data environments scoped, segmented, and documented. SOC 2 Type II posture engineered from the first commit. Encryption, key management, access controls, and evidence collection that your QSA and your auditor can actually work with.
RegTech And Compliance Automation
KYC, AML, sanctions screening, transaction monitoring, BSA reporting, fair lending analytics. Built for speed and built for examination. Custom RegTech that replaces manual workflows without creating new ones when the regulator asks how it works.
A SOC 2 Certified US Software Firm That Speaks Healthcare
Hoyack is a SOC 2 certified software development firm based in San Antonio, TX. We work with organizations where code failure has regulator, auditor, and investor consequences. Payment processors. Retail banks. Credit unions. Fintech startups at every stage from MVP to Series C. RegTech vendors selling into financial institutions. Every engagement is staffed entirely with senior American engineers who have shipped production financial software and can tell you what PCI requirement 10.2 actually asks for.
We’ve seen offshore builds fail PCI assessments, surface MRAs in regulator exams, leak data on unauthenticated endpoints, and get repriced by tech DD firms. We’ve seen vibe-coded endpoints ship to production without anyone reviewing the auth model. And we’ve seen what it looks like when financial software is built for its third user, the auditor, from day one. We partner with your team through every stage. We don’t hand off a codebase and disappear. The difference shows up in every examination, every questionnaire, every diligence review, and every release your compliance team actually approves on the first pass.
Before Your QSA Or Your Next
Investor Does.
30 minutes with a senior engineer who has shipped in healthcare. Straight read on your risk exposure. No sales pitch.
