Case Study
Regulated Crowdfunding Platform
A crowdfunding platform needed an engineering team that could build and maintain regulated financial infrastructure: payment escrow, investor identity checks, accreditation verification, and the admin tooling around it. Silicon Development embedded a 5-person team for 3+ years across 44+ sprints.
Industry
FinTech / Securities
Scope
Software Engineering + Project Management
Team structure
Project manager / scrum master, 4 software engineers. Dedicated team across 3+ years.
What the team needed
Building and maintaining a securities fundraising platform with regulated payment processing, investor identity verification, and compliance workflows
Challenge
The platform facilitated Reg D securities offerings, which meant every piece of the stack touched regulatory requirements. Investor onboarding required KYC/AML identity verification across individual, joint, and entity profiles through a third-party compliance API. Money movement ran through regulated escrow accounts with beneficial owner management. Accreditation status had to be verified before investors could participate. The founder needed engineers who could work inside these constraints without constant hand-holding on the compliance side.
Silicon Development's role
Silicon Development provided a dedicated 5-person team: a project manager running agile ceremonies and a 4-person engineering group. The team operated as the primary development organization, owning the full application lifecycle from sprint planning through production deployment on Heroku.
What Silicon Development worked on
A summary of the work the team owned during the engagement.
Built the payment integration end-to-end: escrow account management, beneficial owner workflows, and regulated money movement for securities transactions
Integrated a third-party compliance API for KYC/AML identity verification across individual, joint, and entity investor profiles
Built self-accreditation and manual accreditation workflows to enforce Reg D compliance requirements
Owned the admin layer: approval workflows, investor management, export tooling, and operations dashboards
Modernized the Rails codebase: migrated all controllers to strong_parameters, reskinned the admin UI, and resolved production stability issues
Ran the full delivery operation: daily standups, sprint planning, grooming, retrospectives, and async coordination through Jira and Range
What changed
The platform operated in production serving real issuers and investors throughout the engagement. The team delivered regulated payment processing, identity verification, and compliance workflows that let the client sell to new customer segments and launch a second product line. The 3+ year engagement covered 44+ sprints of continuous delivery across a domain where getting the details wrong has legal consequences.
Key points
- 3+ year engagement, 44+ sprints of continuous delivery
- Regulated payment and identity verification integrations
- Full compliance workflow: KYC/AML, accreditation, escrow
- Platform supported launch of a second product line during the engagement
The outcome matters, but the operating model is the real point
These results came from engineers working inside the team with real ownership and day-to-day accountability.