Building Vision Bank: digital banking from zero in fourteen weeks

Vision Bank is the one I get asked about most. A digital bank, a regulated brief, a tight runway, and a launch date the team had already announced. Here is roughly how it went and what I would do the same way next time.

The brief

A front of house web platform plus an internal operations console for a digital bank serving customers across the Gulf and the UK. Customer onboarding, KYC, account opening journeys, a marketing site that ranked, and an admin platform the ops team could actually run the bank from on day one.

What I built it on

• Next.js with the App Router, TypeScript end to end
• Postgres for customer data, with strict row level security on the admin side
• Clerk for staff auth, custom flow for customer onboarding
• Stripe for card issuing handoffs and subscription products
• Vercel for the public site, dedicated infra for the regulated bits

The hardest part

Not the code. The regulator. Anyone telling you that the engineering is the hard part of regulated software in the UK has never sat through a six hour meeting on data residency. The lesson I keep relearning is that you build the audit trail before you build the feature, every time.

What I would do the same again

• Stack chosen first, scope locked second, sequencing third
• Three week sprint to a working internal demo, then iterate
• Internal ops console treated as a first class product, not a hack
• Loom updates every Friday so the founders never wondered where it was

What I would do differently

I would spend an extra week on the KYC flows up front. Every fintech project underestimates KYC. Pay that tax in week one and the rest of the build is easier.

If you are a UK founder building anything in the regulated space, drop me a line. High ticket dev work in the UK earns its rate when the brief is this kind of brief.