Healthcare Payments Platform, Built from Zero and Still Growing

Project snapshot

In the US, having health insurance doesn’t mean you can afford the care. Deductibles, copays, and prescriptions still land on the employee. Employers know it. They want to help without raising plan costs.

Our client, a US healthcare fintech, built a benefit for this gap. The employer funds a card. The employee uses it to pay for medical services. The employee sees their balance and spending in one app, with no interest and no fees.

The client started as a business with no engineers. They needed a technology partner who could own the product end to end. A few years in, a larger healthcare payments group acquired the company. That widened the relationship: the parent company brought us in to look at its own systems too.

Business challenge

The client had a clear business model and a short window to prove it. They needed a working, production-grade product fast, and they had no in-house team to build it.

Healthcare payments add pressure to that. The product handles money and personal data, so it has to be reliable and secure from the first release. It also had to scale past a first customer, to employers, administrators, and eventually health plans.

The challenges kept changing as the product grew:

• Reach: the product started as mobile only. A large new enterprise customer needed a web application as well.
• Capacity: the team stayed small yet had to keep production stable and ship new features at the same time.
• Trust: larger enterprise buyers expect independent proof of security controls. SOC 2 Type 2 compliance becomes the gate to the next tier of customers.
• Legacy: after the acquisition, the parent company’s accounting ledger needed replacement with modern integration. The problem was that there was an old infrastructure rather than a new product.

Solution

One partner, full ownership

We acted as the client’s complete technology team. We designed the architecture, wrote the solution designs, built the product, ran quality assurance, and handled deployment and rollout. The client had no engineers, so nothing was handed off to anyone else.

MVP in 8 months

We shipped the first production version in eight months, in scope and on budget. That pace matched the client’s business goals rather than a comfortable delivery calendar.

A second platform when the customer demanded it

When a large enterprise customer signed and asked for a web application, we built it. We kept extending the mobile app in parallel, so existing users didn’t wait until the new surface came together.

A small team that covers both jobs

Three developers split their time between production support and new features. Regular sprint demos keep the client close to what ships and give them a steady feedback loop.

Compliance as an engineering task

We prepared both the client and its parent company for SOC 2 Type 2, working alongside the organization to meet the standard requirements. The audit window has closed and the report from the auditors is pending.

A discovery phase for the parent company

We investigated the parent’s pain points and mapped what replacing its legacy ledger would take. That work ended with the green light to start development on a new integration for its financial and accounting system.

Business outcomes

The client went from no engineering capability to a live product in eight months. Today the product has real users in production, and new end customers are onboarding through both mobile and web apps.

The web platform opened the door to a larger enterprise account. That account would have been out of reach with a mobile-only product.

The SOC 2 Type 2 audit is in its final stage. The client expects the certification to open conversations with bigger enterprise buyers, and it will apply to the whole group’s product portfolio, not just one product.

The relationship has also grown beyond the original engagement. It started with one product. It now includes a second business unit and a legacy system replacement approved to move into development.