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two months bootstrapping a neobank fintech:
1) i think our main lesson last month was: don’t rely on a single partner for money orchestration
on sales call, they have everything you need, but when time comes, sooo many issues present
- some partners have great fees, but very poor api/docs (basically non-implementable, gotta do everything manually)
- some have great API, but extremely rigorous compliance (you integrate the whole thing, to only then find out they wont approve your clients)
- some have great support, but wont cover all rails your clients need (pix only, no ACH, no swift, no named accounts, no microdeposits, etc)
- some have everything you need, but charge a high monthly minimum with 2x fees you got from the other provider
- not to mention the perfect partners, but with abusive contracts that makes our lawyer Claude go crazy
we spoke with ~15 orchestration partners for USD, BRL, EUR, AED, CHF and CNY, and realized there’s no “one size fits all” unfortunately
so we are basically analyzing what each client needs and activating partner XYZ for them - it’s working fine, besides the tech complexity
(though i have already fully integrated 8 partners and it's now taking me 1-2 days to get the whole thing up and running, while larger teams would take weeks - that's the power of repetition)
2) we initially decided on using Base USDC for our backend (even though our clients don’t really see anything stablecoin-related on the dashboard, as a product strategy)
but some banking partners wouldnt work on that chain, and Solana seemed to have better coverage and speed
so we had to build our own bridging process using circle’s CCTP (to make sure no % fees incurred, eating the low fees we charge) - this was pretty cool but very hard to make it work
so now we became not only multi-partners but also multi-chains (no USDT support though, that additional 0.1% was a no-go for us)
3) one of our clients (who turns out to be an old friend), brought his while whole Payroll to Dolafy
i built a special dashboard area so they could add all employees/collaborators, enter their banking details, salary and pay date
then in a single click every month, they would pay that employee anywhere in the world (via ACH, WIRE, PIX or SEPA), using their Dolafy balance
had to work for 20 hours the day it went live, but worked really well and their finance team loved it
(much more organized and simple than the bulk-payment via CSV they were doing at Husky)
the Payroll product itself is not so profitable in comparison to other clients moving millions in one txn, but it was really satisfying to be able to see all these people getting paid by Dolafy
4) the Credit Cards implementation has been my biggest frustration - i even had nightmares with it and woke up many days in terrible mood
even though i implemented their whole API in 2 days, it’s been over a month already and their compliance and legal teams keep slowing us down
things like: “hey, you cant mention the term unlimited cards, must be multiple cards” and then i fix it in 5 minutes, and they submit for approval that takes 7 days again
and then they come back with “you actually cant talk about cards at all on the homepage, must create a separate page for that”
“unlimited back and forth” seems a reasonable term to describe them though
in the end, the partner changed the whole copy of our site and we still couldnt get the approval after 40 days ughh
tbh, im not sure they are that slow because of bad management or because they try to push the onboarding longer to monetize the setup fees
(even though they are losing revenue during this period)
anyway, i hope we have cards live in the coming days which will be huge to get more clients and make the current ones move more money with Dolafy
(unfortunately there are not many BIN Sponsors for Corporate Cards that we could use besides them)
5) my partner is thinking about moving with his wife to Floripa so we can set up a Dolafy office here
the magic island is now the center of crypto and fintech companies in Brazil, plus many of our clients are living here (quality of life and safety for the rich)
them startup offices are mainly in the SC/Jurere area (which is opposite side from where I live on the island) but it’s cool to be a short drive away to people with high synergy instead of a long flight
so yeah, that’s it for now.
talk to you again on our 3rd month building a fintech, hopefully after processing millions in Meta / Google Ads txns (that's what our clients need cards for)
thanks for following
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