FinTech in Nepal: Case Study on Building a Compliant Payment Platform
Lessons learned from architecting a NRB-compliant payment platform KYC, AML, settlement flows, and engineering trade-offs.
FinTech in Nepal is regulated, complex, and incredibly rewarding. Here is what we learned shipping a payment processing platform that handled crore-scale transactions monthly.
Compliance Comes First
NRB licensing requirements, KYC documentation, AML monitoring none of this is optional. The architecture must be designed around audit trails, immutable logs, and segregation of duties from day one.
The Settlement Layer
Real-time interbank settlement requires deep integration with the connectIPS or NCHL switch. Mocking this in development is non-trivial; we built a complete sandbox to simulate edge cases.
Security Engineering
Field-level encryption for PII. Hardware security modules for cryptographic operations. PCI DSS scope minimization through tokenization. Every decision must consider the threat model.
What Worked
A strict event-sourced architecture made audit and reconciliation trivial. Every state change is a recorded event disputes get resolved by replaying history rather than detective work.
What We Would Do Differently
We over-invested in microservices initially. A modular monolith would have shipped six months earlier with the same compliance posture. For most Nepali FinTech startups, monolithic architecture is the right starting point.