Direct answer
Fintech software development is building applications that move or account for money - payments, lending, digital banking and trading. What separates it from other product work is that correctness is not negotiable, every state change has to be reconstructable, and regulation constrains the architecture rather than sitting on top of it.
Fintech engineering
Software engineering for regulated financial products, where an audit trail, reconciliation and controlled access are structural requirements rather than features added later.
What the sector forces you to get right
These constraints shape fintech systems from the first design decision.
Correctness and reconciliation
Money movement has to balance, and disagreements between systems must be detectable rather than discovered by a customer.
Auditability
Who did what, when, on whose authority - retained and reconstructable after the fact.
Access control
Roles, approval thresholds, and separation of duties enforced by the system rather than by policy.
Regulatory constraint
Data residency, retention and reporting obligations that decide where things can run.
Why agents in fintech need a decision layer
This is the sector where 'agents propose, humans decide, systems execute' stops being a slogan. An agent that can move money without a recorded human decision is a control failure, whatever it does for efficiency. The approval gate, the risk tier and the audit trail are the product.
Frequently asked
This is the practice the AI work is built on
We still take this work on. If the system you are describing should also be making decisions on its own, start with the AI side.