Northwind Capital
2025
Rebuilding a 12-year-old fintech without losing a single user.
Northwind's investor portal had grown organically since 2013 — three frameworks, two databases, and a checkout that timed out at peak hours. We rebuilt it from the database up.
What we walked into.
Eight-second TTFB on the dashboard. A 41% drop-off at KYC. Quarterly outages every earnings week. And a board that wanted more features, not a rebuild.
How we engineered it.
- 01
Mapped the legacy system end-to-end and identified the four hot paths owning 80% of revenue.
- 02
Stood up a new TanStack Start + PostgreSQL stack on Cloudflare edge, behind a feature-flagged proxy.
- 03
Migrated one bounded context per sprint with shadow traffic comparisons before cut-over.
- 04
Rewrote the KYC flow with progressive disclosure and inline validation — cutting fields by 38%.
Shipped in 14 weeks with zero downtime. TTFB dropped from 8s to 0.4s. KYC drop-off fell from 41% to 12%. Conversion rose 184% in the first quarter.
"We expected a redesign. We got a different company. The platform feels twice as fast and the team finally trusts release day."