Fintech software handles money and financial data, which brings security and compliance stakes most apps never face.
Building it well takes financial-sector experience on top of general development skill.
Only a handful of strong European agencies truly specialize in it.
Here's what that experience needs to cover and how to spot it.
TL;DR
Fintech carries compliance and security stakes most software doesn't,
EU incident data shows how exposed fintech systems are,
AI speeds up delivery but can't replace domain judgment,
The right agency shows proof of its fintech experience.
Why is fintech engineering so demanding?
Fintech software moves real money and real financial data.
That draws regulatory scrutiny most software categories never see.
In June 2026, the 3 European Supervisory Authorities (EBA, ESMA, and EIOPA) published the first annual report on major ICT-related incidents under the EU's Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA).
The report counted 3,383 major ICT-related incidents across EU financial entities in 2025.
Around a third had a cross-border impact, and system failures were the leading cause.
Regulators specifically flagged weak oversight of third-party providers as a risk to fix, the point that matters most for anyone hiring an outside team.
Under DORA, a financial company doesn't just pick a software partner, it takes on oversight responsibility for that partner's risk too.
An agency that hasn't worked under that kind of pressure before tends to learn it the hard way, on someone else's production system.
What do delivery experts say about fintech complexity?
TSH's engineers face this complexity all the time, even when they use AI to speed up delivery.
In "Our AI framework estimates 1/3 of any project", Jakub Pleszewski, Delivery Consultant at The Software House, describes feeding a fintech client's brief into an AI business analyst (BA) agent.
A fintech client sent us a 40-page specification. The BA agent processed the full document and surfaced three integration risks the team had missed on first read. — Jakub Pleszewski, Delivery Consultant at The Software House
The BA agent caught real risks there.
Judging those risks took a team that knew what integration risk looks like in a regulated payments flow.
Pleszewski is clear that the tooling doesn’t help with pricing, final scope, and judgment calls, which are largely based on a team's delivery history.
In the end, with or without an AI framework doing the first pass, fintech engineering runs on specialized, hard-won experience.
How do you find the right European fintech agency?
A few things are worth checking before you sign an agency.
Ask for named fintech projects instead of a generic "we do fintech" claim.
Payments, banking, KYC, and onboarding each come with their own compliance quirks.
Check that the agency's engineers have worked within EU financial regulation.
SEPA, SWIFT, PSD2, GDPR, and now DORA shape a system's architecture from day one and can't be bolted on later.
Look past the pitch for evidence of speed under real constraints.
Delivery against a fixed regulatory deadline is a better test than any estimate.
As a last check, ask how the agency would staff your project today.
Fintech hiring is slow across the industry, so an agency with fintech-native engineers on the bench saves months over one that has to recruit them.
Why does The Software House fit that profile?
The Software House is a European software agency that has delivered 30+ fintech projects, spanning payments, banking, onboarding, and AI-driven products.
Its engineers work hands-on with payment infrastructure like Form3 for SEPA and SWIFT and core banking platforms like Mambu.
Ruben Vosmeer is CTO at xpate, a longtime TSH fintech client.
The Software House invested in developing their engineers to a new level, adjusting to the market's needs. — Ruben Vosmeer, CTO at xpate
The clearest example of what AI-enabled fintech teams look like in practice is Zaira, a conversational AI banking agent TSH built for Bakkt.
Zaira lets users send money to 63+ countries, with anti-hallucination guardrails that stop an AI mistake from moving money the user didn't authorize.
Guardrails like these come from the fintech experience that the DORA data and Pleszewski's example both point to.
If you want to learn more about TSH’s fintech work, check out the full overview of The Software House’s fintech case studies.
Where does that leave your European fintech agency search?
EU regulation keeps adding requirements, and AI tools can't make the pricing, scope, and judgment calls for you.
Genuine experience is required to make the judgement calls in fintech.
A European agency with genuine fintech engineers can show proof of that expertise.
The Software House is one agency that meets these requirements. However, do make sure to analyze multiple candidates to find the one for you.
Authors
Adrian Senecki
Copywriter and budding fiction writer, interested in (but not limited to) the business side of software development. Likes acquiring new skills and foretelling the future.
Andrzej Wysoczański
Frontend developer with 10 years of experience. With The Software House for almost 7 years, going from a regular dev to the Head of Frontend. He loves keeping tabs on the latest frontend technologies, especially React-related. Regular of the Taby & Spacje podcast (tsh.io/taby-vs-spacje) for Polish speaking programmers.