Mohammad Areeb Siddiqui

I help fintech founders who don't have a CTO but need one yesterday.

You built a payment company. You raised money. You hired an agency or a small dev team. And now something is wrong. Payouts are failing silently. Your reconciliation drifts by thousands every week. An auditor just told you your "PCI-compliant" code is logging card data in plaintext. Or your technical co-founder left and took everything that wasn't documented with them.

I've spent 13+ years building and operating payment infrastructure at scale. At Wise, I worked with systems processing billions of financial events. At SWVL, I helped the finance team reduce payment errors by 90%. At Dubizzle, I drove 60% revenue growth. I've seen what payment systems look like when they work and what they look like when they're about to collapse.

As your fractional CTO, I step in and do the work a full-time CTO would do, without the 18-month commitment or equity dilution. Week one: I audit every payment flow end-to-end, identify what's broken, and tell you exactly what needs to happen. Then I make it happen. Architecture decisions, compliance strategy, team structure, vendor selection, code quality, observability, shipping cadence. All of it grounded in real fintech domain knowledge, not generic startup advice.

What I solve: - Payment infrastructure failing with no clear root cause- Agency-built code that can't pass a PCI audit- Technical leadership gaps after a CTO departure- Teams shipping too slowly to hit compliance deadlines- Architecture decisions being made without anyone who understands settlement cycles, reconciliation, or payment processor quirks I work with payment companies, neobanks, lending platforms, insurtech, and wealthtech startups. If real money flows through your system and something isn't right, I've fixed that exact problem before.