01
Week 1
MVP in 24 Hours: investor-education surface
24-hour engagement on a specific investor-education surface. Shipped a working prototype that ran against SAMCo's live data. Prototype passed internal compliance review the following week.
Financial ServicesSAMCo
Retail brokerage engineered for compliance and conviction.
Product engineering and portfolio-intelligence work for a fast-growing Indian retail brokerage — with the SEBI-grade compliance and cost discipline the sector demands.
Client
SAMCo
Sector
Financial Services
Duration
16 months
Team
6 (product engineers, a compliance advisor, an SRE, a UX designer)
The client
About SAMCo.
SAMCo is a discount retail brokerage headquartered in Mumbai, building modern investing surfaces for a new generation of Indian retail investors. The company operates under SEBI regulation, competes on both product experience and price, and grew from a start-up brokerage to serving millions of retail investors across cash, F&O, mutual funds, and margin products. The compliance overhang is genuine: every surface the company ships is subject to SEBI audit, and every audit finding is a material business event.
Context
Where SAMCo was when we started.
SAMCo is a retail brokerage building modern investing surfaces for the next generation of Indian retail investors. The company operates under SEBI regulation, competes on both product experience and price, and needed a product engineering partner that could ship at consumer-fintech pace without breaking the compliance posture.
Challenge
The problem, unvarnished.
- SEBI-grade audit trails on order flow, execution, and client communication — every surface has to withstand regulator inspection at any time.
- Product velocity of a consumer fintech with the change-control discipline of a regulated broker. These two things are in tension; most brokerages err on the side of one and lose the other.
- Portfolio-intelligence surfaces for retail investors — showing risk without spooking, showing performance without misleading. The UX is a regulatory question, not just a design question.
- A stack that was showing its age as the company scaled beyond its first million clients — the same architecture that supported half a million users started to strain at three million.
- Cost pressure on infrastructure: brokerage per-user economics are tight, and every basis point of infrastructure cost matters.
Approach
How we scoped and sequenced the work.
01
Ship the small thing, fast, correctly
Started with MVP in 24 Hours on a specific investor-education surface. Proved the working model, then scaled the engagement to multiple product surfaces.
02
Compliance-first architecture
Order-flow audit trails, client-communication logging, and change-control disciplines baked into the platform, not bolted on. Compliance sat in the sprint reviews, not the pre-release gate.
03
Portfolio Intelligence for retail investors
Deployed the Portfolio Intelligence pattern for retail investors — position aggregation, risk telemetry, mandate awareness — with a UX that respects investor sophistication levels without dumbing down.
04
Cost-aware infrastructure
Retail brokerage economics are tight. Infrastructure choices were made against a per-user-cost budget, not against generic 'best practices'.
Timeline
How the engagement unfolded.
02
Months 1–3
Compliance architecture & first production surface
Order-flow audit trail, client-communication logging, and change-control patterns designed. First production surface — investor education — shipped in week 6 with SEBI review completed in parallel.
03
Months 4–8
Portfolio Intelligence surface
Retail Portfolio Intelligence surface — position aggregation, risk telemetry, mandate awareness — designed and shipped. UX validated against three investor-sophistication cohorts.
04
Months 8–14
Platform re-architecture & cost discipline
Underlying stack re-architected for the next order of magnitude of retail investors. Infrastructure cost-per-user budget defined and enforced. Passed two SEBI audit cycles on delivered systems.
05
Months 12–16
Additional investor surfaces
Additional surfaces (margin, F&O education, tax-loss visibility) delivered on the same platform pattern. Handoff to SAMCo's internal engineering team.
Solution
What we shipped.
Product engineering across multiple investor-facing surfaces, portfolio-intelligence layer, and the compliance and infrastructure discipline to sustain a regulated retail brokerage at scale.
Architecture & decisions
The choices behind the build.
01
Audit trail is a database write, not a log
Every order-flow event, client-communication event, and change-control event is a first-class database row with a schema regulators can query directly. Log-file-based audit trails were rejected as insufficient at code review with SAMCo's compliance team.
02
Compliance in the sprint review
Compliance officer sat in the sprint review, not the pre-release gate. Every user story carried a compliance implication note. Zero surface has ever shipped without compliance sign-off — because compliance was there the whole time.
03
Per-user cost as a first-class metric
Every infrastructure decision was tested against a per-user-cost budget. Cost dashboards were owned by engineering, not finance — engineering could see the per-user cost of a design decision the day it landed in prod.
04
React Native for iOS + Android; Next.js for web
Common product surfaces are built once in React Native, shipped to iOS and Android. Web surfaces are built in Next.js. A shared design system spans both. Sharing components across surfaces is a policy, not a hope.
Rollout & adoption
How it landed inside the organisation.
The rollout was deliberate. First a 24-hour MVP that proved the working model, then a six-week production surface that established the compliance-first pattern, then platform-scale re-architecture with additional surfaces built on top. SAMCo's internal engineering team was embedded in every phase so knowledge transfer happened continuously, not at the end. When the engagement wound down, no runbook document had to be written — the operating knowledge already lived in SAMCo's own team.
Outcomes
The numbers that matter.
6 wks
First surface to production
From MVP in 24 Hours engagement to a production release on the investor education surface. Regulatory review completed in parallel with build.
0
SEBI audit findings on delivered systems
Across two annual compliance cycles on systems delivered under the engagement. Change-control discipline held from sprint one.
3.2M+
Retail investors on the platform
As the company scaled through the engagement period. Infrastructure held per-user-cost budget throughout.
Tech stack
What we built it on.
TypeScriptNext.jsReact NativeNode.jsPythonPostgreSQLRedisKafkaAWSTerraform
Reflection
What we learned.
The tension between consumer-fintech velocity and regulator-grade change control is real, and most brokerages resolve it by slowing down. SAMCo resolved it by putting the compliance officer in the sprint review — and treating compliance implications as a design constraint that ships with the code, not a gate that ships after the code. That single operating change is what let velocity and compliance coexist.
What's next
The engagement today.
The engagement is currently in an advisory posture — SAMCo's internal engineering team owns the platform. Ongoing collaboration is at a lower cadence, focused on the next generation of retail investor surfaces and on preparing the platform for the company's next scaling threshold.
“Consumer-fintech pace with regulator-grade change control. That combination is rare and it's the one thing we couldn't afford to compromise on. The engagement shipped every surface on the date we committed to internally.”
Talk to the team
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