Regulatory compliance, financial data integrity, and security architecture are the major technical constraints driving every design choice in fintech product development from the outset. General software development usually treats these problems as secondary needs or as post-build enhancements. The practical difference shows up in places such as PCI DSS network segmentation, PSD2 Strong Customer Authentication logic, and immutable audit logging, all of which involve basic design choices that are hard to retrofit into an existing system.

