An SEC-registered crypto investment advisory platform had just completed a Series A funding round in which it managed to raise about $35 million. They decided to transition from a trading bot marketplace into a full, consumer-facing, automated portfolio management.
The goal was to create a mobile app and web platform that could be used by any consumer, even those who were not used to the usual complexity of crypto exchanges, API keys, and trading bots.
In order to do this successfully, they would need to create applications that were not only consumer-friendly but would also hold up to regulatory scrutiny, and it would all have to be done before the market gap closed.
Trio helped them by providing skilled fintech talent to drastically scale their team in timelines that conventional hiring could not support, and take their idea to a production-ready application.
Let’s look at how exactly this was done.
If you want to expand your fintech talent by augmenting your staff with our pre-vetted talent, book a call.
Starting From Scratch in a Regulated Market
At the time Trio came on board, the company had fewer than 20 total employees, and the CTO who had brought us on was only the second person who worked full-time in engineering.
A team that size might handle one product if they had all the necessary skill sets on their team.
However, this company needed a React Native mobile app, a browser-based web platform, and the backend infrastructure to power both.
On top of the sheer volume of the development work that needed to be done, as an SEC-registered investment advisor, every user-facing flow needed to meet compliance standards. KYC onboarding, wallet creation, and custody integrations with institutional-grade providers.
Even a small misstep could lead to massive regulatory consequences later.
They had previously worked with a contractor, but it was an Eastern European firm. Time zone gaps and cultural misalignment slowed collaboration, which they could not afford now.
Related Reading: Engineering Team Bandwidth Issues
Scaling the Team Fast Enough to Actually Matter
Trio helped them to grow the engineering organization from under 20 to over 80 people in roughly six months.
We were able to provide quality, fintech-experienced engineers who had the ability to operate with minimal hand-holding, since a startup at that stage simply has no bandwidth to onboard slowly or to review every decision.
Through the assistance of these developers, the company was able to build its application with:
- User authentication and signup flows
- Investment portfolio management screens
- Wallet creation and crypto asset display
- Account funding and transaction flows
All of it was designed for someone who had never touched a crypto platform before and needed the experience to feel as frictionless as a neobank app.
At the same time, a separate group of Trio engineers worked on the web platform simultaneously, building for feature parity with the mobile product.
Keeping two teams aligned required deliberate coordination throughout, which the teams appear to have managed. The same can be said for our developers who worked on their backend services like the APIs, data layer, and exchange integrations.
The result is that everything worked well together and reached the production-ready stage in a timely manner.
Related Reading: Fintech Team Augmentation
Why FinTech Experience is Critical
According to the company’s lead engineer, Trio’s engineers would surface concerns before those concerns became expensive.
If a front-end decision looked likely to create problems for the backend data model downstream, they raised it early rather than shipping what the ticket specified and leaving the mess for the next sprint.
That behavior proves harder to screen for than technical skill, and really only comes from extensive experience in the industry, working on similar projects where the developers are faced with these kinds of issues.
The CI/CD setup reflected the same attention. The team built a continuous deployment pipeline for mobile that enabled updates to TestFlight and Android testing environments with automated testing baked in at each stage.
Plenty of early-stage startups that we have worked with before try to skip this and pay for it when the team grows, and release coordination becomes problematic.
What the Platform Looked Like When They Were Done
In the end, the mobile app moved past core feature development and into analytics integration, CRM tooling, and user behavior tracking.
That transition tends to signal that a product has passed from “still being built” to “preparing to scale.”
For an investor-backed platform working against a market window, this was an incredible achievement that will hopefully set them up for success going forward.
As the product neared completion, the team scaled down by around 50%. If they need them going forward, the team can have access to these engineers through Trio again, so that they are able to keep a large team with institutional knowledge.
What This Suggests for Fintech Companies in Growth Mode
This engagement has demonstrated that augmented staffing can work in high-stakes fintech contexts, but the caliber of the people matters more than the raw headcount.
If you are considering expanding your fintech team through staff augmentation, connecting with Trio means that you can gain access to our pre-vetted pool of specialists, hand-picked based on your project and requirements.
This careful screening and selection means the developers can onboard extremely quickly, and can start producing meaningful code in as little as 3-5 days.
Book a staff aug consult.
