Choosing a software partner is hard. Choosing one to build a product that a central bank will audit is a different problem, and most selection processes are not set up for it.
The usual checklist covers stack, rates, team size and time zones. None of that tells you whether a vendor can ship a product that survives a compliance review, or what happens to your codebase when the contract ends. Below is what we think buyers in financial services should actually be asking, and how we answer those questions ourselves.
What changes when the software is regulated
In most projects, a bug costs you a release. In a regulated financial product, it can cost you a license.
Central bank compliance, AML and KYC controls, fraud prevention and full audit trails are not features you add at the end. They shape the architecture from the first sprint: how you model transactions, where you store personally identifiable data, how you version business rules that regulators will ask you to reproduce two years from now.
This is why “we can build anything” is a weak answer in this sector. A team that has never operated under those constraints will make reasonable engineering choices that turn into expensive rework once the first audit arrives.
Five questions worth asking
Who owns the architecture? Some vendors place engineers under your tech lead and stop there. Others take responsibility for the technical decisions and their consequences. Both models are valid, but they are not the same purchase, and the price difference usually reflects that. Be explicit about which one you are buying.
How does the team handle legacy? Most financial products are not greenfield. There is a core system that cannot go down, written in a language the original team no longer maintains. Ask how a vendor has modernized a system while it stayed in production, not how they would rebuild it from scratch.
Who answers for quality? If QA sits outside the team and gets involved at the end, defects surface late and cost the most. Ask where testing lives in the delivery process and who is accountable when something reaches production.
How does knowledge transfer work? This is the question buyers skip and regret. Documentation, code ownership and onboarding of your internal team should be part of the engagement from the start, not a closing task.
What happens when the project ends? A good partner leaves you with a system your own team can operate. Ask what the handover looks like in practice.
Where third-party reviews fit
You cannot verify most of the above from a website. This is where independent sources earn their place: verified client reviews, security certifications, and case studies specific enough to check.
Reviews on directories like GoodFirms matter because the client is the one talking, and because the platform verifies the engagement before publishing. They are not the whole picture. A certification such as ISO 27001 tells you how a vendor handles information security. A case study with named scope and measurable outcomes tells you whether they have solved a problem shaped like yours. Read all three together, and treat any vendor that offers none of them with caution.
How we answer these questions
Luby is a product engineering firm with an office in Miami and a delivery center in Brazil, building software for fintechs and financial institutions since 2002. We hold ISO 27001 and ISO 27701 certifications and are AWS and Google Cloud partners.
On architecture ownership: our engineers own architecture, delivery and quality. We work as full product teams rather than as staffing.
On legacy: we built a microservices core banking platform for a Banking as a Service fintech that sustains 99.99% uptime and serves more than 50 active BaaS clients, and we redesigned the digital banking platform of a core banking technology provider serving over 200 community banks in the United States, reducing development costs by 39%.
On regulated complexity: we designed and built a Pix payment gateway connecting the United States and Latin America, with intelligent transaction routing, fraud prevention and AML/KYC controls integrated with major Brazilian financial institutions.
On outcomes: a digital banking transformation we delivered for a US community bank increased digital adoption by 45%, reached 92% customer satisfaction, and enabled the launch of seven digital banking products.
If you are evaluating partners
Take the five questions above into your next vendor call, whether or not we are on the list. They separate teams that have shipped regulated financial products from teams that are confident they could.
You can see our verified profile and client reviews on GoodFirms. If you want to talk through a specific problem, we are happy to have that conversation before there is a proposal on the table.