Banking and Financial Services Software Development
Updated
Sthenos Technologies (Sthenos LLC) builds and integrates software for banking and financial services: core banking, payments and digital wallets, lending, wealth management, insurance and open banking, plus AI for fraud signals, document processing and risk, with immutable audit logging and segregation of duties built in. Building a fintech product rather than running a financial institution? See fintech software development.
Clients of NeoSOFT
Banking & Financial IT Services & Solutions
Core Banking
Key Highlights:
- Faster time to market with modular deployments
- Unified customer data and connected channels
- Improved operational efficiency and flexibility
- Compliance with global banking regulations
Retail & Commercial Banking
Key Highlights:
- Enhanced customer loyalty and engagement
- Seamless onboarding and KYC automation
- Unified view across retail and corporate customers
- Smart analytics for personalized offerings
Payments & Digital Wallets
Key Highlights:
- Secure and real-time payment experiences
- Advanced fraud detection and risk prevention
- Cross-border and multi-currency support
- Regulatory compliance and transaction transparency
Insurance Technology Solutions
Key Highlights:
- Streamlined policy and claims processing
- Personalized customer engagement
- Enhanced data insights for underwriting
- Faster go-to-market for new insurance products
Lending Solutions
Key Highlights:
- End-to-end loan lifecycle automation
- Reduced processing time and manual intervention
- Advanced analytics for risk and credit evaluation
- Scalable digital lending architecture
Wealth & Asset Management
Key Highlights:
- Automated portfolio and asset tracking
- Streamlined client onboarding and KYC
- Secure integration with third-party tools
- Real-time insights for better investment outcomes
Open Banking
Key Highlights:
- Secure API design and integration
- Increased transparency and customer trust
- Ecosystem development for new revenue streams
- Improved agility and interoperability
Capital Markets
Key Highlights:
- Real-time data and trading intelligence
- Predictive analytics for portfolio optimization
- Streamlined compliance management
- Fast and secure market operations
Key Highlights:
- Faster time to market with modular deployments
- Unified customer data and connected channels
- Improved operational efficiency and flexibility
- Compliance with global banking regulations
Key Highlights:
- Enhanced customer loyalty and engagement
- Seamless onboarding and KYC automation
- Unified view across retail and corporate customers
- Smart analytics for personalized offerings
Key Highlights:
- Secure and real-time payment experiences
- Advanced fraud detection and risk prevention
- Cross-border and multi-currency support
- Regulatory compliance and transaction transparency
Key Highlights:
- Streamlined policy and claims processing
- Personalized customer engagement
- Enhanced data insights for underwriting
- Faster go-to-market for new insurance products
Key Highlights:
- End-to-end loan lifecycle automation
- Reduced processing time and manual intervention
- Advanced analytics for risk and credit evaluation
- Scalable digital lending architecture
Key Highlights:
- Automated portfolio and asset tracking
- Streamlined client onboarding and KYC
- Secure integration with third-party tools
- Real-time insights for better investment outcomes
Key Highlights:
- Secure API design and integration
- Increased transparency and customer trust
- Ecosystem development for new revenue streams
- Improved agility and interoperability
Key Highlights:
- Real-time data and trading intelligence
- Predictive analytics for portfolio optimization
- Streamlined compliance management
- Fast and secure market operations
Custom AI Solutions Designed For Measurable Business Outcomes
Selected Project Examples
Digital Relationship Manager Application Built for India’s Largest Banking Institution
Enabling structured financial planning and stronger client relationships through a centralized digital platform
(NeoSOFT project)
Interactive Chatbot Built for a Global Bank to Improve Customer Support at Scale
Delivering secure, always-on customer assistance across 2,000+ branches
(NeoSOFT project)
What clients say on Clutch
“Their work has improved the quality of our software, reduced bugs, and helped us maintain positive performance trends across our platform.”
Clutch review, December 13, 2025
“Sthenos Technologies' strong design sense and understanding of UX stood out.”
Clutch review, October 23, 2025
“We were particularly impressed by their technical expertise, professionalism, and the quality of their work.”
Clutch review, December 8, 2025
“Report generation that once took hours now happens in minutes.”
Clutch review, December 1, 2025
“Their work has noticeably improved the performance and reliability of our systems.”
Clutch review, December 13, 2025
Financial software is mostly integration work with an evidence trail attached. What follows is what a financial build is actually made of, which rules reach it and who each one binds, what moves the cost and the timeline, and what to ask any vendor, us included.
Depending on the seniority and mix of the team. Where the scope is clear we quote a fixed price for a defined outcome.
Working software arrives every two weeks, so drift is visible while it is still cheap to correct.
As of September 2026 Sthenos holds no SOC 1 or SOC 2 report, PCI DSS attestation or ISO 27001 certificate of its own.
Primary NAICS 541511, active on SAM.gov.
On this page
- What we build for financial teams
- The rules a financial software project has to satisfy, and who each one binds
- What financial buyers ask about these rules
- Tokenising at the provider versus holding card data yourself
- What drives the cost and the timeline of a financial build
- What to ask any financial software vendor
- How the work is structured, and who is accountable
- How a financial build runs, from scope to live
- What you receive
- Related pages on this site
- Talk to an engineer
What we build for financial teams
The list below is what a financial build is actually made of, and after it, the Sthenos service pages that sit around the build itself.
Figure 1. Where a financial build touches other people's systems
Nothing in this diagram is a count. Every box is a system or an artefact named elsewhere on this page: the providers in the build list above, and the four artefacts in the vendor questions below.
The build
- Core banking integration. Reading and writing against the core, and living with a release calendar you do not control.
- Payment rails and digital wallets. Card, transfer and wallet flows, and the reconciliation between what your application recorded and what the provider actually settled.
- KYC and AML provider integration. Identity, screening and case handling wired into onboarding rather than bolted beside it.
- Market data feeds. The integration itself, plus the questions the provider's terms force you to answer: who is entitled to see the data, and what you may redistribute.
- Tokenisation. Keeping cardholder data out of your environment by tokenising at the provider. It is the single largest lever on PCI scope, which is why we design for it first.
- Immutable audit logging. Who saw or changed which record, when, and why, in a store nobody can quietly edit.
- Segregation of duties. No single person can move code to production unreviewed, and the pipeline is where that is enforced rather than a policy document.
- Open banking APIs. Consented access, and a consent record that has to outlive the session that created it.
- Fraud detection. Scoring inside the transaction path, and the review queue behind it.
- Reconciliation and exception handling. Any product that moves money has to agree with somebody else's settlement record, and disagreements are a build, not a report.
- Legacy modernization. Re-platforming aging financial systems while preserving data integrity and the audit trail.
The services around it, all sold on this site
| Service | What it covers for a financial team |
|---|---|
| Custom software development | The build itself, with the delivery model and the code ownership terms stated in full. |
| Enterprise software development | Systems that have to survive an enterprise procurement and an enterprise security review. |
| Penetration testing | Puts a qualified attacker against your systems under contract, on a fixed scope, and hands you a report you can act on. |
| Cybersecurity | Threat intelligence, monitoring and security-by-design around the product rather than inside it. |
| Production readiness audit | An independent review of a system before it carries real users, real money or real regulatory exposure. |
| Software testing | The evidence that the thing behaves as specified, which is what a reviewer asks for after the demo. |
| IT staff augmentation | Pre-vetted engineers who join your team when the gap is people rather than a project. |
| Managed services and infrastructure management | Monitoring, securing and running the estate once the build is live. |
| Cloud and cloud migration | Where the system runs, which is also where data residency and backup design get decided. |
| Data analytics | The modelling work that settles what a customer is, and which of four systems holding revenue is correct, before anyone builds a dashboard. |
| Artificial intelligence and agentic AI | Risk, fraud signal, document processing and forecasting models, engineered for production rather than for a demo. |
| IT consulting | Advice and decisions, which is a different purchase from running the thing day to day, and the page says so plainly. |
The rules a financial software project has to satisfy, and who each one binds
Each entry names who issues it, whom it binds and what it asks of the software, and links the issuer's own page so you can read the source rather than take our word for it. Where a rule is a law or a regulation it is tagged mandatory. Where it is an examination an organization chooses to undergo, it is tagged voluntary. Shorthands used for these rules: SOX for the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, GLBA for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, BSA for the Bank Secrecy Act, which is how FinCEN itself refers to it, Reg E and Reg Z for the two Consumer Financial Protection Bureau regulations, and NYDFS Part 500 for the New York cybersecurity regulation.
| Rule | Who issues it, and whom it binds | What a software build has to do |
|---|---|---|
| PCI DSS Mandatory where card data is in scope | The PCI Security Standards Council. Its stated audience is entities that store, process or transmit cardholder data or sensitive authentication data, or that could impact the security of the cardholder data environment, which it says includes merchants, processors, acquirers, issuers and service providers. | The council describes the standard as a baseline of technical and operational requirements designed to protect payment account data. The largest decision in a payments build is how much of that environment you take on at all, and tokenising at the provider is the way to keep it small. |
| Bank Secrecy Act and AML Mandatory | FinCEN, at the US Department of the Treasury. FinCEN states the BSA authorizes Treasury to impose reporting and other requirements on financial institutions and other businesses to help detect and prevent money laundering. | FinCEN says the implementing regulations require institutions to keep records of cash purchases of negotiable instruments, file reports of cash transactions exceeding $10,000 in daily aggregate, and report suspicious activity. Thresholds, aggregation windows, the case file behind a report and the retention of both are all application logic. |
| OFAC sanctions Mandatory | The Office of Foreign Assets Control at the US Department of the Treasury. Its own FAQ answers the question directly: all U.S. persons must comply, including all U.S. citizens and permanent residents regardless of where they are located, all individuals and entities within the United States, and all U.S. incorporated entities and their foreign branches. | The build has to be able to stop a transaction, and to record what was screened, against which list version, and who decided what. A screening result nobody can reconstruct later is not evidence. |
| 23 NYCRR Part 500 Mandatory for Covered Entities | The New York State Department of Financial Services. A Covered Entity, in the department's own words, is any individual or organization operating under or required to operate under a license, registration, charter, certificate, permit, accreditation or similar authorization under the Banking Law, the Insurance Law or the Financial Services Law. | DFS states that Covered Entities must implement and maintain risk-informed cybersecurity policies and programs. A vendor is not a Covered Entity, but that program reaches its third parties, so the build has to produce what it needs: the access model, the logs, the encryption arrangement, and a route to tell the entity fast enough for it to file its own notice of a cybersecurity incident. |
| Sarbanes-Oxley, sections 302 and 404 Mandatory for issuers | Enacted by Congress as Public Law 107-204 and implemented through SEC rules. Section 302 reaches companies filing periodic reports under the Securities Exchange Act, whose principal executive and financial officers must certify each annual or quarterly report. | Section 404 requires the annual report to carry an internal control report and requires the issuer's registered public accounting firm to attest to management's assessment. Any system feeding the financial statements therefore needs access control, change control and a record of both that an auditor can follow. Section 802 of the same Act makes knowingly altering or falsifying a record to impede a federal matter a crime, which is why those records are stored so they cannot be quietly edited. |
| FINRA Rule 4511, books and records Mandatory for member firms | FINRA, binding on its member firms. The rule requires members to make and preserve books and records as required under the FINRA rules, the Exchange Act and the applicable Exchange Act rules. | It requires members to preserve for at least six years those FINRA books and records with no specified period elsewhere, in a format and media that complies with SEA Rule 17a-4. Retention is a design decision, not an operations decision: format, media and deletion rules have to be settled before the first record is written. |
| Regulation E, 12 CFR Part 1005 Mandatory | The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The regulation says it carries out the purposes of the Electronic Fund Transfer Act, which establishes the basic rights, liabilities and responsibilities of consumers who use electronic fund transfer and remittance transfer services, and of the financial institutions or other persons that offer them. | Disclosures, error resolution and the timing rules around them are product behaviour rather than policy documents. The application has to carry the clock, and it has to be able to show that it did. |
| Regulation Z, Truth in Lending, 12 CFR Part 1026 Mandatory | The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Its stated purpose is to promote the informed use of consumer credit by requiring disclosures about its terms and cost. | The regulation also gives consumers the right to cancel certain credit transactions secured by a principal dwelling, regulates certain credit card practices, and provides for fair and timely resolution of credit billing disputes. Disclosure content, the calculation behind it and the dispute workflow are all software. |
| Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act Mandatory | Enacted by Congress; the business guidance cited here is published by the Federal Trade Commission, which describes the Act as reaching financial institutions, meaning companies that offer consumers financial products or services like loans, financial or investment advice, or insurance. | The FTC states the Act requires those institutions to explain their information-sharing practices to their customers and to safeguard sensitive data. Two build consequences: the privacy notice and the customer's preference state have to be real records, and the safeguards have to be demonstrable rather than asserted. |
| PSD2, Directive (EU) 2015/2366 Mandatory for payment service providers in scope | The European Parliament and Council. Article 97 requires Member States to ensure a payment service provider applies strong customer authentication where the payer accesses a payment account online, initiates an electronic payment transaction, or carries out any action through a remote channel which may imply a risk of payment fraud or other abuses. | For remote electronic payments the same article requires authentication that includes elements which dynamically link the transaction to a specific amount and a specific payee. That dynamic link has to be designed into the payment flow rather than added to the login screen. |
| GDPR, Regulation (EU) 2016/679 Mandatory where its territorial scope reaches you | The European Parliament and Council. Article 3 applies it to processing in the context of the activities of an establishment of a controller or processor in the Union, and to processing of personal data of people who are in the Union where the activity relates to offering them goods or services or monitoring their behaviour. | Article 28(3) requires that processing by a processor be governed by a contract or other legal act setting out the subject matter, duration, nature and purpose of the processing and the categories of data. Data residency, deletion that reaches backups, and a processor contract that names subprocessors are build decisions, not paperwork added at the end. |
| CCPA, as amended Mandatory for the businesses it covers | A California statute. The California Attorney General's office describes it as securing the right to know what personal information a business collects and how it is used and shared, the right to delete personal information collected from them, the right to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information, and the right to non-discrimination for exercising those rights. | The same office says businesses have responsibilities including responding to consumer requests and giving notices explaining their privacy practices. Know, delete and opt out are three product features with a clock on each, and each has to reach every copy of the data, the analytics warehouse included. |
| SOC 1 Voluntary | An examination performed under AICPA standards. The AICPA describes SOC 1 as an examination of controls at a service organization that are likely to be relevant to user entities' internal control over financial reporting, intended for those user entities and the CPAs who audit their financial statements. | If your platform sits inside a customer's financial reporting chain, their auditor will ask about your controls. What the build decides is whether the answer is evidence or a promise. |
| SOC 2 Voluntary | An examination performed under AICPA standards. The AICPA's own guide title describes it as reporting on an examination of controls at a service organization relevant to security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, or privacy. | The controls behind it are ordinary engineering: access, logging, encryption, change management and vendor management, evidenced continuously rather than assembled in the month before an audit. It is frequently required by a contract or a procurement process, which is not the same thing as being required by law. |
What Sthenos does about all of this
We build to these controls and we hand you the evidence. We do not hold them. As of September 2026 Sthenos holds no SOC 1 or SOC 2 report, PCI DSS attestation or ISO 27001 certificate of its own. Formal certifications and audits are the institution's to hold; we engineer our part to support them, and we say so in the first conversation rather than at procurement.
So if a vendor tells you their software is compliant, the useful follow-up is which of the rules above they mean, who examined it, and what date is on the report.
What financial buyers ask about these rules
Does PCI DSS apply if we never touch a card number?
The PCI Security Standards Council names its audience as entities that store, process or transmit cardholder data, and those that could impact the security of the cardholder data environment. Tokenising at the provider is how a product stays in the second group, which is why we design for it before anything else.
What is NYDFS Part 500, and does it reach a software vendor?
It is the New York Department of Financial Services cybersecurity regulation. It binds Covered Entities, which the department defines as organizations licensed or otherwise authorized under New York's Banking, Insurance or Financial Services Law. A vendor is not one, but the entity's cybersecurity program reaches its third parties, so your build has to produce the evidence that program needs.
Who has to do OFAC screening?
OFAC's own FAQ says all U.S. persons must comply with OFAC sanctions, including citizens and permanent residents wherever they are, everyone inside the United States, and U.S. incorporated entities and their foreign branches. In a payments product that means screening sits inside the transaction path, with a record of what was checked and against which list.
Is SOC 2 required in financial services?
Not by law. SOC 2 is a voluntary examination performed under AICPA standards. It is often required by a contract or a procurement process, which is a different thing and worth separating when someone tells you it is mandatory. Sthenos holds no SOC 2 report of its own and says so before procurement rather than during it.
Tokenising at the provider versus holding card data yourself
For any financial services software that takes card payments, the PCI DSS row above names the largest decision in a payments build: how much of the cardholder data environment you take on at all. These are the two sides of it, each line taken from this page.
Tokenise at the provider
What we design for first- Cardholder data stays out of the environment you have to defend.
- It is the single largest lever on PCI scope, which is why we design for it first.
- It does not take the product out of PCI DSS altogether: a product that could impact the security of the cardholder data environment is still in the council's audience, the second group named in the answer above.
Store, process or transmit card data yourself
The council's first group- The PCI Security Standards Council names entities that store, process or transmit cardholder data first in its stated audience.
- How much regulated data you take into your own environment is the first item on this page's list of what moves the cost, because it decides how much of everything else applies at all.
- What your scope looks like after the design is the question to put to any vendor: an architecture answers it, a certificate does not.
What drives the cost and the timeline of a financial build
This page publishes a price band in the FAQ at the foot of it, and the site publishes an hourly rate on every page. What follows is what moves them, so you can work out which end of a band you are at before anyone quotes you. There are no new figures in this section on purpose: the honest answer is a function of the items below.
What moves the cost
- How much regulated data you take into your own environment. Tokenising card data at the provider is the largest single lever, because it decides how much of everything else applies at all.
- How many core systems the build has to integrate with, and whether they are yours to change. An integration you control is a feature. One you do not is a negotiation with a release calendar attached.
- Which regulator is actually in play. The evidence a bank examiner expects is not the evidence a card acquirer expects, and neither is what a consumer protection rule asks for.
- The number of user roles, and how finely the access model has to be cut. Role count drives the test matrix more than it drives the code.
- Transaction volume and the peak you have to survive. That decides architecture rather than features, and architecture is the expensive thing to change later.
- Whether the product is internal or commercially distributed. Distribution adds support, versioning and a customer security review for every buyer.
- Whether an audit trail exists already or has to be retrofitted. Retrofitting one costs more than building it in, because it means going back through every write path in the system.
- Data residency. It constrains hosting, backup design and who may look at production, and those constraints reach the team shape as well as the architecture.
What moves the timeline
- Access. Nothing starts until credentials, a sandbox and a usable test data set exist, and that is a decision inside your organization or your provider's rather than ours.
- The provider's release calendar, when you are integrating with a core system you do not control.
- Security review cycles, yours at the start and your customers' once you distribute.
- Whether the evidence package is produced as you go or assembled at the end. Assembling it at the end is where projects that looked finished lose time.
- How many decisions are still open on the day the build starts.
We publish the cadence rather than making you ask for it. We work in two week sprints, so working software arrives every two weeks and drift is visible while it is still cheap to correct. Our rates are $150 to $250 per hour, depending on the seniority and mix of the team, and where the scope is clear we quote a fixed price for a defined outcome.
What to ask any financial software vendor
This list is written to be used against us as well. A vendor who cannot answer these is not automatically the wrong vendor, but you will find out what they cannot do later rather than now, and later is the expensive time to find out.
- Which of the rules above have you actually built under, and for what kind of institution? The answer is specific or it is marketing.
- May I have the auditor's name and the date on the report? Ask for that rather than the word compliant. An examination produces a document carrying both.
- Who holds the encryption keys, and what happens when that person leaves? Key custody is the question behind most of the others.
- What happens to the code and the cloud accounts at exit? Get the answer into the contract rather than the pitch.
- Where are the engineers physically located? Data residency and access review both depend on it, and so does the answer you give your own regulator.
- How do you keep cardholder data out of scope, and what does my scope look like after your design? An architecture answers this. A certificate does not.
- What is in the evidence package and when do I receive it? Ask for the artefacts by name.
- Who signs the contract, and who does the work? If they are different organizations, ask how accountability crosses that line.
- What does your retention design do when a regulator's retention period and a customer's deletion request disagree? Every financial product meets this, and it is cheaper to decide it on a whiteboard.
- What will you not do? A vendor with no boundary has not thought about yours.
The artefacts, by name:
- The access control model
- The audit log design
- The encryption arrangement
- The retention and deletion rules
How the work is structured, and who is accountable
Sthenos Technologies is a US firm headquartered in Tysons, Virginia. A senior Sthenos lead owns the engagement, not a rotating bench.
You own what we build. In the words already published on our custom software development page: you do, entirely, from the first commit. The repository and the cloud accounts are in your name, with no licence back to us and no dependency on us continuing to exist.
Sthenos is an EDWOSB and WOSB certified small business, primary NAICS 541511, active on SAM.gov, which is worth knowing if you are an agency or a prime with supplier diversity goals.
The shapes this work takes
Where the scope is clear we quote a fixed price for a defined outcome, with a costed roadmap before any build starts.
Before a system carries real money, which is the cheapest thing on this list.
Where our engineers join your team and your process rather than running a separate one.
Once the system is live and the question becomes who is awake at three in the morning.
On a fixed scope, which is what your auditor and your customers will ask you for by name.
The standard we measure a finished system against is published in full: the production readiness checklist, which scores reliability, data and recovery, observability, security, performance, release and rollback, and ownership. You are welcome to score us with it.
How financial software development runs, from scope to live
Each step below restates a sentence already on this page, put in the order the work happens. No step carries a duration beyond the two week sprint, because this page publishes none.
- Scope and a costed roadmapWhere the scope is clear we quote a fixed price for a defined outcome, with a costed roadmap before any build starts.Before any build starts
- AccessNothing starts until credentials, a sandbox and a usable test data set exist, and that is a decision inside your organization or your provider's rather than ours. Where banking software development integrates with a core system you do not control, the provider's release calendar sets part of the timeline too.Your organization or your provider
- Design the scope downTokenising at the provider is designed in first, because how much regulated data you take into your own environment decides how much of everything else applies at all.Designed first
- Build in two week sprintsWorking software arrives every two weeks, so drift is visible while it is still cheap to correct. We build to the controls this page names and hand you the evidence.Every two weeks
- Prove it before it carries real moneyThe standard we measure a finished system against is the published production readiness checklist. An independent production readiness audit and a penetration test on a fixed scope are two of the shapes this work takes.Before real money
- Run itManaged services and infrastructure management, once the system is live and the question becomes who is awake at three in the morning.Once live
What you receive from our financial software development services
Every item below is already a commitment on this page or on the page it links to, gathered in one place so you can hold any financial software development company, us included, to the same list.
- A costed roadmap before any build starts, and a fixed price for a defined outcome where the scope is clear.
- Working software every two weeks, so drift is visible while it is still cheap to correct.
- The repository and the cloud accounts, in your name from the first commit, with no licence back to us.
- The evidence package Figure 1 shows the application producing: the access control model, the audit log design, the encryption arrangement, and the retention and deletion rules.
- A report you can act on where a penetration test is part of the work, and a prioritised findings report where a production readiness audit is.
The rules above bind institutions and reach a build through controls the institution has to be able to evidence. In financial compliance software, that is what the evidence package is for.
Related pages on this site
Services
- Custom software development, enterprise software development and software development services.
- Penetration testing, cybersecurity and production readiness audit.
- IT staff augmentation, managed services and infrastructure management.
- Cloud, data analytics and artificial intelligence.
Sectors and regulated work
- Fintech software development, the product build page, with the rules keyed to what a product does.
- Public sector IT and government IT services, for federal, state and local financial and grant programs.
- Healthcare software development, the same evidence-first approach applied to HIPAA and SOC 2.
- Legal and professional services.
Before you commission anything
- The production readiness checklist, the standard we measure a system against.
- MVP development and SaaS development, if the product is earlier than a platform.
- About Sthenos, including what we tell buyers to check before hiring us, and how to reach an engineer.
Ready to talk? Tell us what you are building and we will tell you how to get it to production, securely. Request a free consultation.
Platforms We Work With
We work across cloud, enterprise platforms, and digital technologies—helping organizations deliver secure, scalable, and future-ready solutions.
