Last quarter, a fintech company approached us to rescue a failing project. They’d hired a vendor to build an expense management platform with payment integrations in two months — an aggressive timeline that should have raised red flags. Ten months later,
they had nothing in production, a budget that had tripled, and a vendor relationship that had completely deteriorated.

This scenario plays out more often than it should in our industry, and the consequences in fintech are particularly severe.

When you’re dealing with payment processing, regulatory compliance, and financial data security, cutting corners on initial scoping doesn’t just delay launch dates; it can expose your organization to compliance violations, security vulnerabilities, and customer
trust issues that take years to rebuild.

The Lowball Estimate Problem in Fintech

In my 25 years working with financial technology companies, I’ve seen three recurring patterns that lead to unrealistic estimates:

• Competitive pressure trumps reality: In RFP situations, vendors sometimes prioritize winning the contract over providing honest assessments. This is especially common with teams that lack deep fintech expertise and don’t fully grasp the
  complexity of payment rails,
  PCI compliance requirements, or the nuances of integrating with banking APIs.
• Discovery gets shortchanged: Proper requirements analysis takes time to understand your compliance framework, audit your existing tech stack, map out third-party dependencies, and identify integration challenges. When vendors skip this
  phase to appear more agile or cost-effective, they’re essentially building estimates on assumptions rather than facts.
• Technical complexity gets underestimated: Building consumer apps is one thing. Building systems that handle money movement, maintain PCI-DSS compliance, integrate with legacy banking infrastructure, and meet regional regulatory requirements
  is exponentially more complex. Teams without specialized fintech experience routinely underestimate what’s actually required.

What Actually Happens

When a fintech project is underestimated, the fallout follows a predictable pattern:

Timelines drag. That “quick six-month build” stretches into 18 months, missing critical market windows or regulatory deadlines.

Budgets explode. The initial “savings” evaporate as change orders pile up. Industry data suggests
over 70% of software projects exceed their original budget and timeline, and in fintech, where the cost of technical debt includes compliance risk, those overruns are often more severe.

Technical debt becomes technical liability. Rushed code in a payments system can mean failed transactions, data breaches, or compliance violations. I’ve seen companies spend more on

audits and remediation than they would have spent on proper development in the first place.

What to Watch For When Evaluating Vendors

If you’re comparing proposals for a fintech project, here’s what I recommend:

• Demand detailed scope documentation: Make sure you’re comparing equivalent deliverables. A lower price often means reduced scope, missing compliance considerations, or skipped security reviews. In fintech, what’s left out matters as much
  as what’s included.
• Verify fintech expertise: Ask about specific experience with payment processing, financial regulations, and banking integrations. Generic software development experience doesn’t translate directly to fintech complexity.
• Question dramatically lower estimates: If one bid is significantly cheaper or faster, dig into why. We regularly review competitor proposals and find they’ve underestimated integration complexity, overlooked compliance requirements, or
  simply don’t understand what’s actually involved in building production-grade financial software.

Final Thoughts

In fintech, trust isn’t just about delivering features but about delivering systems that handle money securely, comply with regulations, and scale reliably. That trust starts with an honest, thorough estimate that accounts for the real complexity of what
you’re building.

We may not give you the fastest or cheapest estimate, but we’ll give you a realistic one that we’ll deliver on. In an industry where the cost of failure includes regulatory risk, security breaches, and lost customer trust, that accuracy is worth far more
than an initial “savings” that evaporates by month three.