Building Fintech Products at Scale, Leadership in Regional Markets and the Future of Digital Finance

What does it take to build a fintech product from the ground up, scale it across markets and keep evolving as customer expectations, technology and regulation change?

In Episode 8 of Next in Finance, Michael Petrilli speaks with fintech product and financial services leader Monica Millares about the realities of building and scaling digital financial products across developed and emerging markets.

Drawing on more than two decades of experience across financial services, product strategy and digital finance, including roles with Barclays, Visa, Tandem Bank and BigPay, Monica shares lessons from building products from zero to scale, navigating Southeast Asia’s diverse markets and leading product teams through periods of rapid change.

The conversation explores the intersection of fintech product development, financial infrastructure, regulation, customer experience, AI in financial services and leadership, and what these shifts could mean for the next generation of digital finance.

Guest: Monica Millares
Host: Michael Petrilli
Topic: Building Fintech Products at Scale, Leadership in Regional Markets, and the Future of Digital Finance

From Traditional Financial Services to Building Fintech from Scratch

Monica’s journey into fintech began before “fintech” was a widely used term.

After building her foundation in traditional financial services, she took the leap from Barclays into the UK’s emerging digital banking ecosystem and later moved to Malaysia to help build BigPay.

At BigPay, the challenge was not simply creating technology. It was also helping customers become comfortable with an entirely new digital financial experience.

Early digital onboarding required users to submit identification and take a selfie, behaviour that is commonplace today but was unfamiliar to many customers at the time. The experience highlighted an important lesson for fintech businesses: technology adoption is often as much a customer behaviour and trust challenge as it is a technical challenge.

Scaling Fintech Products Across Regional Markets

Building a fintech product for one market is difficult. Expanding across multiple jurisdictions introduces another level of complexity.

Monica discusses why fintech companies need a clear market-entry strategy before expanding and why regulatory requirements, licensing, capital requirements and customer behaviour can vary significantly from country to country.

A product proposition may remain broadly similar across markets, but regulation can directly influence the product experience, onboarding journey and underlying operating model.

For fintechs, neobanks and other financial institutions considering regional expansion, that creates an important strategic question: should the company obtain its own licences and infrastructure in every market, or work with regulated partners and models such as banking-as-a-service or other financial infrastructure providers?

The answer depends on the market, product, economics and long-term strategy.

Why Financial Infrastructure and Partner Selection Matter

One of the central themes of the conversation is the importance of the technology and infrastructure sitting behind a fintech product.

When building a financial product, product teams must decide what capabilities they should build internally and where specialist partners can provide the underlying infrastructure.

That can include technology, APIs, onboarding, market connectivity, payments, compliance-related workflows, data or other financial infrastructure.

The choice of partner can have implications well beyond an initial launch. Monica explains that a solution capable of supporting an MVP may not necessarily provide the flexibility, scalability or innovation required as a business grows.

Technical capabilities matter, but so does the relationship between organisations.

Product, technology and engineering teams need to understand whether a partner’s infrastructure can support their future roadmap, while leadership teams also need to consider whether the organisations are aligned in their approach to customers, innovation and long-term partnership.

APIs, Infrastructure and Building for Scale

As financial institutions increasingly use APIs and modular technology to develop new customer experiences, the underlying infrastructure becomes an important part of product strategy.

A fintech may connect to multiple technology and financial infrastructure partners rather than building every capability internally. The quality of those integrations can influence product velocity, scalability and the ability to introduce new functionality.

That makes evaluating financial services APIs and infrastructure about more than the initial integration.

Teams need to consider questions such as:

• Can the technology scale as customer and transaction volumes grow?
• Does the infrastructure support the company’s future product roadmap?
• How easily can developers integrate and iterate?
• How are regulatory and operational requirements incorporated into the workflow?
• Can the provider continue to innovate as financial markets and technology evolve?
• Is the relationship structured as a long-term partnership rather than simply a vendor arrangement?

For firms building investing experiences, similar considerations can apply when evaluating brokerage APIs, trading APIs, market data, digital onboarding, KYC, global market access and other brokerage infrastructure.

Compliance Cannot Be an Afterthought

Speed matters in fintech, but financial services operate within regulated environments.

Monica argues that there is no shortcut around compliance. Instead, one way businesses can improve product velocity is by involving legal and compliance teams earlier in the development process.

When regulatory requirements are discovered late, teams may have to redesign workflows or change the architecture of a product. Bringing relevant stakeholders together earlier can help teams incorporate requirements into the product roadmap before significant development has taken place.

The broader lesson is that fintech compliance and product development should not operate in silos.

For companies building financial products at scale, regulation needs to be considered alongside technology, customer experience and commercial objectives from the beginning.

How AI Could Change the Financial Customer Experience

The discussion also turns to AI in financial services and its potential role in product development.

For product teams, Monica sees an immediate opportunity to use AI to accelerate parts of customer research, feedback analysis, prototyping and product testing.

But the longer-term opportunity may be even more significant.

Historically, much of digital financial services has been reactive: customers open an application when they want to complete a financial task.

As AI becomes more capable and financial institutions gain access to richer sources of customer-permissioned information, digital financial experiences could become more contextual and proactive.

Rather than offering every customer the same set of products and journeys, future financial platforms could increasingly adapt experiences based on individual circumstances and needs.

The direction Monica sees is toward hyper-personalised financial products at scale.

AI Governance and Customer Outcomes

Greater personalization also creates new responsibilities.

Monica highlights the importance of AI governance as financial institutions introduce AI into customer-facing experiences.

Questions around data, decision-making, recommendations and customer outcomes become particularly important when an AI system is interacting with someone’s financial life.

As customers become increasingly comfortable relying on AI-generated information, fintech companies need to carefully define appropriate use cases, establish controls and consider whether an AI-enabled interaction is producing an appropriate customer outcome.

The opportunity, therefore, is not simply to add AI to a financial product. It is to identify where AI genuinely improves the customer experience while maintaining appropriate governance and oversight.

Product-Market Fit Is Not Enough: Fintechs Need a Path to Profitability

Another lesson from Monica’s experience is that product strategy and commercial strategy need to work together.

Earlier generations of fintech businesses often followed a model of building first, acquiring users, finding product-market fit and addressing profitability later.

Monica believes today’s environment requires businesses to think about the commercial model and path to profitability much earlier.

A strong product needs to solve a meaningful customer problem, but it also needs a sustainable business model.

That means product leaders cannot treat commercial considerations as something separate from product development. Customer value, differentiation, pricing and unit economics all need to form part of the strategy.

Building Diverse Teams to Build Better Financial Products

The episode also explores diversity in fintech and technology leadership.

For Monica, the rationale is straightforward: customers are diverse, so the teams designing financial products benefit from bringing together different experiences, perspectives and backgrounds.

Diversity goes beyond gender. It can include professional experience, personality, geography, culture and ways of thinking.

She also challenges the way the industry often frames the question of retaining women in technology.

Rather than asking women what they need to do differently to remain and progress in the industry, Monica argues that leadership teams should examine the environments they are creating.

Wellbeing, psychological safety, fair compensation, sustainable workloads and clear career progression can all contribute to environments where different people have the opportunity to perform and grow.

The Future of Digital Finance: Hyper-Personalisation at Scale

Looking ten years ahead, Monica expects the skills required of product teams to shift significantly.

As AI and software development tools accelerate how quickly products can be built, the differentiator may increasingly become the ability to understand what should be built and why.

Financial products that are relatively standardised today—such as cards, accounts and lending products—could increasingly become building blocks for experiences tailored to individual customers.

The challenge for tomorrow’s fintech leaders may therefore be less about whether technology can build something and more about understanding customers deeply enough to determine what should be built for them.

The result could be a new generation of digital financial services defined by personalization, adaptability and financial products configured at scale around individual needs.

Key Takeaways from Episode 8

• Building fintech products requires behavioural change and customer trust as well as technology.
• Scaling across regional markets requires a deliberate market-entry and regulatory strategy.
• Infrastructure and technology partners can either enable or constrain future product growth.
• Product, technology, legal and compliance teams benefit from collaborating early in the development lifecycle.
• AI can accelerate customer research and product development, but customer-facing applications require thoughtful governance.
• Fintech businesses need to consider commercial sustainability and customer outcomes together.
• Diverse teams can provide broader perspectives when designing products for diverse customer populations.
• The future of digital finance could increasingly move toward hyper-personalised financial experiences at scale.

About Monica Millares

Monica Millares is a fintech product and financial services leader with more than two decades of experience spanning financial services, product strategy and digital finance.

Her career has included experience across developed and emerging markets and organisations including Barclays, Visa, Tandem Bank and BigPay. She has worked on building and scaling financial products across Southeast Asia and is also active in conversations around purpose-driven fintech, financial wellbeing, inclusive product design and product leadership.

About Next in Finance

Next in Finance is a ViewTrade podcast featuring conversations with leaders shaping the future of financial services, investing, technology and market access.

Through discussions with operators, innovators and industry leaders, the series explores the technology, infrastructure and ideas influencing how financial services are being built and delivered around the world.

Disclaimer: This podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. The views expressed by podcast guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of ViewTrade or its affiliates. Nothing discussed should be construed as investment, legal, tax or financial advice, or as an offer, solicitation or recommendation to buy or sell any security or financial product.