Financial sector software: fintech platforms, compliance automation, secure portals and legacy modernisation

Financial services across Europe face a paradox: regulators demand ever-tighter controls around operational resilience (DORA), payment services (PSD2/PSD3), anti-money laundering (AMLD) and data governance, while customers expect digital experiences as seamless as the best consumer apps. Banks, insurers, asset managers, accounting firms and fintech challengers all feel this pressure, yet their responses differ wildly. Some try to bolt modern UIs onto decades-old core banking platforms; others acquire point solutions that create new data silos. Neither approach scales well. The challenge is compounded by open banking mandates that force traditional institutions to expose their data through APIs, often without the technical infrastructure to do so securely and at scale. Insurers wrestling with Solvency II modelling find their actuarial teams overwhelmed, while policyholders expect an app that lets them file a claim in minutes with photo evidence and AI-assisted assessment. Asset managers face MiFID II suitability requirements that demand real-time portfolio risk checks before any trade execution, yet their legacy platforms process these checks in overnight batch runs. Custom software offers a third path: rebuilding specific domains (loan origination, KYC orchestration, portfolio management, claims handling) as API-driven services with compliance, auditability and security built into the architecture from the start. By treating regulation as a design constraint rather than an afterthought, financial organisations can innovate faster, reduce manual overhead and create customer journeys that convert. MG Software partners with financial institutions across the Netherlands and beyond to make this transition manageable: from threat modelling and architecture decisions through to production-ready software that delivers value within weeks, without lowering the compliance bar.

Pain points

• Complex, continuously evolving regulations (PSD2, MiFID II, DORA, AMLD) that require specialised knowledge of both technology and legal frameworks and consume significant manual effort each reporting cycle
• Legacy core systems built for batch processing that block real-time innovation, generate escalating maintenance costs and make it difficult to meet modern API-first integration requirements
• Growing cybersecurity threats targeting financial data, combined with strict breach notification obligations and potential fines of up to four percent of annual revenue under GDPR
• Customer expectations shaped by neo-banks (Bunq, Revolut, N26) for instant onboarding, real-time balance updates and personalised financial insights, while incumbent portals feel dated and slow
• Fragmented data landscapes where the same customer exists in multiple systems with conflicting records, making reconciliation a manual exercise that delays reporting and erodes trust in numbers
• Prolonged customer onboarding (KYC, UBO verification, PEP screening) that kills conversion rates when orchestration is absent and checks cannot be reused across products or business lines
• Quarterly and annual regulatory reporting to DNB, AFM or ECB assembled manually from spreadsheets, with inherent risk of errors, restatements and late submissions
• Insufficient real-time visibility into operational risk and IT resilience, despite DORA explicitly requiring institutions to continuously monitor and demonstrate their digital robustness

Our solutions

• Policy-as-code compliance engine implementing rules (transaction limits, four-eyes principles, sanctions screening) as configurable code, so regulatory changes are deployed within days rather than months of manual programming
• AML and KYC case management platform with automated document capture, real-time PEP and sanctions list screening, risk scoring and complete audit trail per client file, connected to national registers such as the Chamber of Commerce and UBO register
• Strangler-fig legacy modernisation: new domains (loan origination, portfolio management, claims intake) built as decoupled microservices connected via events and API gateway, eliminating the need for big-bang migration
• Secure customer portals with strong authentication (FIDO2, iDIN), session security, granular consent flows compliant with GDPR and a user experience that competes with app-only banks for both retail and business users
• Reporting API layer and data vault architecture for automated reconciliation between accounting, operational systems and supervisory reports, including full data lineage so every figure is traceable to its source
• Real-time monitoring and alerting dashboards for DORA compliance: continuous surveillance of IT resilience, incident response times, chain dependencies and recovery capacity, with automatic escalation when thresholds are breached
• White-label B2B2C portals for intermediaries and advisers with role-based access, data scoping per relationship and branded experience, enabling digital distribution channels without governance compromises

Benefits

• Dramatically fewer manual compliance hours as screening, checks and reporting run automatically with full audit trails accessible to supervisors on demand
• Lower IT maintenance costs through incremental legacy modernisation, avoiding the operational risk of large-scale migration projects
• Strengthened cybersecurity posture meeting the strictest financial industry standards (ISO 27001, SOC 2) and DORA requirements around digital operational resilience
• Higher customer satisfaction and conversion through fast mobile onboarding and real-time visibility into financial positions via intuitive, secure portals
• Improved data quality and traceability as reconciliation runs automatically and every mutation is traceable from source system to supervisory report
• Faster time-to-market for new financial products because domains are built as decoupled services that can evolve independently of the core banking monolith

Technologies

Our approach

Every engagement starts with a threat model and regulatory scope session: which products, which data classifications, which supervisors. From there we design a target architecture with clear domain boundaries and security classification per service. We then build in two-week sprints with fixed security gates: dependency scanning via Snyk or Dependabot, secrets management in a vault, code review with four-eyes principle and penetration testing milestones every third sprint. Legacy components are replaced slice by slice using the strangler-fig pattern, so product teams never face months of big-bang risk and existing services continue uninterrupted. Each release is validated by both developers and compliance officers, with automated regression tests covering audit logs, reporting formats and role-based access rules. We work closely with your DPO and CISO to integrate privacy impact assessments (PIAs) and risk analyses into the development lifecycle. Post-launch, we monitor performance, incidents and compliance signals via dashboards giving CISOs, risk managers and product owners shared real-time visibility into platform health.

How to measure success?

Key metrics include customer onboarding throughput (from application to approval), number of manual compliance actions per case, mean time to detect and mean time to respond to security incidents, percentage of automated versus manual reconciliations, and error rate in quarterly supervisory reports. All metrics are tracked in real-time dashboards accessible to the CISO, risk management and product teams, ensuring deviations are visible immediately and corrective action can be taken without delay.