Do fintech startups have technical challenges?
Looking at Coinbase, Affirm, Robinhood, Stripe, Wealthfront, Plaid, Addepar, etc... Does these companies actually have technical challenges? Seems like their engineering work is mostly centered around business logic and application development. This is fine, but it’s a far cry from real technical challenges like distributed systems and AI. Is it worth going to these “hot” startups if there aren’t hard engineering problems?
Depends what space you get into. Payment technologies, especially those involving International markets tend to be heavy on business logic and compliance related drudgery.
Time zones, unit conversions, laws, governments, etc.
Risk analysis, secure transaction input, scale...
Matching both sides of a trade to maximize your arbitrage position
As evidenced by the fact that data engineering/ model performance is our biggest bottleneck right now, I’d say yes. Guess it matters what you hope to get out of coming to a “hot” startup, though .
Addepar’s had lots of really tough distributed/scaling problems to solve as they’ve signed more and more clients bringing in an enormous amount of data into the platform in a short period of time.
Depends on what they are trying to tackle. Fin tech is very broad. I’m currently starting a fintech company and we primarily will be handling business logic for the first 2 yrs then tackling more advanced problems with AI years 3+