Independent fintech architecture leadership
From product vision to production-ready platforms. An independent Chief Architect helping fintech companies design new products, modernize complex platforms and build high-performing architecture teams.
Lisbon Metropolitan Area. Home base.
01 / Expertise
A good diagram says more than a thousand words, and I draw a lot of them. But a diagram is where architecture starts, not where it ends. Fintechs need someone who owns the hard technology decisions, sees them through to production, and leaves behind a team that can sustain the results.
Launch
“We’re launching a new fintech product and need the right architectural foundations.”
Turning product vision into a platform architecture that is secure, compliant and ready to scale from day one, without over-engineering the first release.
Scale
“Our platform is growing, but performance, resilience, technical debt or cloud dependencies are holding us back.”
Pragmatic, incremental modernization of platforms already in production, so the business keeps moving while the foundations improve.
Mature
“We need an architecture function that can make good decisions and enable engineering teams to deliver.”
Building and leading architecture teams, with lightweight governance that speeds up delivery instead of slowing it down.
Any stage
“We need experienced architectural leadership, but not necessarily a permanent executive hire.”
Senior architecture leadership embedded in your organization, working alongside your CTO, product and engineering leadership.
A card platform breaks in different places than a pricing engine does. Here’s where I’ve worked, and what I learned to watch for in each.
| Domain | What it demands | Proven at |
|---|---|---|
| Payments, cards & open banking | Performance & resilience. Card authorization against a blockchain, holds and settlement on a hot path where every millisecond and every token count. | Omnumi |
| Core & digital banking | Extensibility & security. Platforms that banks extend and white-label, multi-tenant and ready for SaaS and BaaS. | Backbase, Technisys |
| Transaction banking | Scalability & cloud independence. Microservices and real-time streaming, deployable on public, private or hybrid cloud. | Intellect Design Arena |
| Pricing & billing | Extensibility & cost-efficiency. An established enterprise system turned into a headless, API-based, cloud-native product. | Zafin |
| Digital currency | Scalability & auditability. Tokenized deposits, stablecoins and CBDC that scale horizontally and stand up to a regulator. | Omnumi |
02 / Approach
Working with executive stakeholders to translate business goals into architecture and technology decisions, and explaining the trade-offs in business terms.
When the risk is technical, I write and run the proof of concept with the help of the senior architects and tech leads on my team. It runs alongside delivery, so product teams keep shipping and never wait on architecture. Every proof of concept is held to banking-grade non-functional requirements.
Building architecture practices that engineers actually use. The measure is not how good the documents look, but how many decisions reach production.
03 / Method
Frameworks like TOGAF were built for large enterprises. I developed my own method from years of running architecture in agile teams. It is light enough for startups and scale-ups, and I set up the tooling that tracks every architecture change from idea to implementation.
PoliciesWhat we always do, across every initiative
Every decision shows where it really stands, from draft to implemented. Rejected, superseded or deprecated decisions carry the reason.
Independent reviewers, no self-approval, and compliance sign-off where SOC2 applies. Nothing gets waved through by one person.
The same practice works for a five-person startup and a regulated bank. Only the thresholds change.
One searchable record of what was decided, by whom and why, with every review, comment and approval kept in an audit trail.
04 / Engagements
Five long-term engagements since 2015. These were accountable leadership roles, not short advisory assignments.
Scale · Omnumi
Challenge A compliance-first platform for tokenized deposits, regulated stablecoins and CBDC ran on a single permissioned chain, which capped its growth.
My role Chief Architect. Re-architected the platform and designed the multi-chain asset management and cross-chain controller architecture.
Outcomes A cloud-agnostic, horizontally partitioned product. New chains are provisioned automatically as load grows, and value moves atomically between them, invisible to the application and compliance layers. Two US patent applications filed.
Modernization · Zafin
Challenge An established pricing and billing platform for financial institutions had to become scalable, extensible and cost-efficient to deploy.
My role Chief Architect, end-responsible for architecture across all product lines, from decision through to implementation.
Outcomes Led the automation transformation program into a cloud-native, deployable product, and defined the foundations for a headless, API-based pricing and billing engine.
New platform · Intellect Design Arena
Challenge A transaction banking platform built on microservices, real-time streaming and big data had to deploy on public, private or hybrid cloud.
My role Chief Architect Digital. Defined the business, data and application architecture: API-first design, gateway, GraphQL, token management and orchestration.
Outcomes One architecture blueprint across the platform. Development led across India, the UK and the USA, with regular briefings to C-level.
Teams & governance · Omnumi
Challenge A regulated platform needed architecture decisions that were fast, traceable and auditable, without slowing engineering down.
My role Set up and run the architecture practice and team using this method, and built the tooling it runs on.
Outcomes Around 30 documented microservices, roughly 70 decisions and 20 platform policies under live review, with real quorum and SOC2 sign-off where it applies. Every decision is traceable to production.
05 / About
Finatics is the independent architecture practice of Robin Huiser. When you work with Finatics, you work directly with me. There are no account managers and no junior consultants in between.
I have been a Chief Architect since 2016, at Intellect Design Arena, Technisys (now SoFi Tech Solutions), Zafin and Omnumi. Before that, I grew from solutions architect to Technical Director of Backbase’s Atlanta office. I spent the decade before that on internet banking, core banking and integration architecture for Dutch banks and banking software vendors.
Someone has to hold the whole picture and still be able to open an editor and prove that the hard part actually works. I design the architecture, prove the hard parts in code when the risk is technical, and lead the team that turns a decision into something shipped.
I live and work in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area, and I’m proud to call it home. It’s a base, not a boundary: over the past fifteen years I have worked in 17 countries across Europe, North America, Asia and Australia, often on-site with clients and engineering teams. From 2016 to 2020, at Intellect Design Arena, I spent long periods based in Chennai, India. That experience shapes how I work: architecture has to succeed across cultures, time zones and distributed teams, not just on a whiteboard.
Today I work with clients in the UK, US, Canada and Europe, remotely and on-site, in English and Dutch. I also speak conversational Portuguese.
Contact
Building something new? Scaling an existing platform? Looking for architecture leadership without a permanent hire? Tell me where you are, and we’ll see whether I can help.
Também podemos conversar em português.