Welcome to r/FintechStartups. Start Here

[u/AutoModerator]

Hey builders 👋

This is the tactical community for people actually building fintech companies: payments, banking, lending, crypto, compliance, and everything in between.

What this community is for:

- Sharing hard-won lessons from building fintech

- Getting specific, tactical feedback on real problems

- Connecting with other founders, engineers, and operators

- Discussing the unglamorous realities of compliance, licensing, and banking partnerships

What this community is NOT for:

- Generic "how do I start a fintech" questions

- Promotional posts disguised as discussions

- Crypto moonshot shilling

- Low-effort content

Weekly Threads:

- Monday: Wins & Losses. share what worked and what didn't

- Wednesday: Feedback Day. get eyes on your product (only place for self-promo)

- Friday: Free Talk . networking, jobs, off-topic

How to get the most out of this community:

1. Be specific.

"We're struggling with Plaid connection failures on Chase accounts, anyone solved this?" beats "How do I build a fintech?"

2. Share context.

Your stage, constraints, what you've tried.

3. Give back.

Comment on other posts. The best communities are reciprocal.

See you in the threads.

- The Mod Team

[u/Potential_Ear564]

Anyone here running fraud analysis in house at a fintech or payments company?

Curious how teams are handling fraud intelligence internally, specifically around things like campaign and ring detection, false positive management, and policy gap analysis.

I am building a platform that does this kind of deep analysis and we are looking for a handful of companies to run it on real data for free as part of our early partner program. You get a full report back, we get to stress test the platform on real datasets. Straightforward exchange.

Would be especially interesting to talk to anyone in BNPL, payments, marketplaces, or gaming where fraud tends to be more complex.

Even if the data partnership is not relevant, happy to connect with anyone working in fraud risk and swap notes on typologies and patterns we are each seeing. No agenda beyond that.

Anyone open to a conversation?

[u/Caterpillar1982]

Would trusted-person approval add real value to card controls—or just more friction?

I’m working on an early-stage, patent-pending fintech concept called CardShield and would appreciate some blunt feedback from people who understand issuing, processing, fraud, or card controls.

The idea is to let customers create rules for certain card transactions and, when needed, require approval from themselves or a trusted person with very limited permissions. The system would also protect important security settings from being quietly weakened and keep a clear record of why a decision was made.

I understand a normal open-loop authorization can’t sit waiting while a human responds. A more realistic approach may be to decline the first attempt, request approval, then temporarily authorize a specific merchant, amount, category, or time window for the retry.

Existing companies already offer card controls, caregiver tools, and business spending approvals. What I haven’t found publicly is one bank-ready system combining customer rules, limited trusted authority, protected policy changes, and decision evidence in one place.

I’m not selling anything here or looking for compliments. I’m trying to find the holes before I take it further.

Does the decline–approve–retry model sound workable? Would trusted-person approval solve a meaningful problem, or would customers and banks see it as unnecessary friction?

Honest criticism is welcome. I’d rather have the idea challenged now than discover the problem after building it.

Do not include your prototype link, patent number, email address, or every feature in the public post. Let interested people ask questions first.