Fintech compliance basics for startup software

Regulated domains reward systems that are boring on purpose: traceable changes, least-privilege access, and data boundaries you can explain to a partner bank in one diagram.

Audit trails early

Append-only event logs for money movement, permission changes, and admin actions. Store who, what, when, and before/after values.

PII minimization

Collect only fields you use. Tokenize where possible. Separate environments and never copy production data to laptops.