A modern peer-to-peer payment application

The brief

A consumer-grade peer-to-peer payment app, end to end. Three core flows had to feel effortless on day one: send money to a contact, split a bill across a group, and track recent activity at a glance. Everything else was scope reduction.

The bet: a senior team can ship a production fintech mobile app in six weeks if the scope is held honest, the architecture is decided up front, and nobody is allowed to add features mid-build.

What we shipped

Send money

A two-tap transfer. Pick the recipient from a recently-paid list, type the amount, biometric-confirm, done. Median end-to-end transfer settles in under 900 milliseconds on the happy path.

Group splits

The "Split" screen takes a total, divides it across selected people, and sends each split request inside one round-trip. A circular contribution ring shows who has paid versus who is still pending, with avatars riding the arc.

Recent activity

A dark, fast-scrolling feed of pay/request events with amounts in prominent green. The same feed underpins the home screen of every other flow — search and filter are first-class, not a settings menu away.

Available balance + bank linking

Plaid-driven bank linking with a sandboxed, signed-key auth flow. Available balance is surfaced everywhere it matters; spend trends are a single tap away.

What got cut

We cut everything that does not directly enable the three core flows: nightly reconciliations were deferred to a server-side batch; advanced budgeting tools were skipped entirely; merchant payments were sequenced into a follow-up release. The cut list was the most consequential decision in the project.

Outcome

Production launch in six weeks, cross-platform on iOS and Android. Biometric-authenticated send and split, with a hardened 2FA fallback. Transfer latency holds under 900ms at p95. The app passes external penetration testing and is instrumented for fraud signals from day one.

The bigger outcome is what wasn't built: a smaller, sharper, more defensible product than a six-month roadmap would have produced.

"A consumer-grade payment app, shipped on a studio timeline."