The idea for StackTalk started at 2 AM in a conference room at a Series B fintech where I was leading product. We were three weeks from launching a new lending product. Engineering was done. Design was done. Marketing was ready. But we couldn't ship — because compliance review had stalled.
Our two-person compliance team was buried in a spreadsheet with 400 rows, manually mapping our product's features to state lending regulations. They'd been at it for six weeks. Every time they thought they were done, someone would find another regulation that applied, and they'd have to start a new section.
We ended up launching two months late. By then, a competitor had beaten us to market.
A pattern, not an anomaly
I assumed this was a problem specific to our company — maybe we just needed a bigger compliance team, or better processes. But when I talked to friends at other fintechs, I heard the same story everywhere. Product launches delayed by compliance. Engineering teams pulled into audit prep. Compliance officers drowning in manual evidence collection. Six-figure consulting invoices for work that felt like it should be automated.
The more I dug in, the more I realized this wasn't a people problem or a process problem. It was a tooling problem. The compliance tools available to fintechs were either (a) enterprise GRC platforms designed for Fortune 500 banks — expensive, bloated, and impossible to implement quickly — or (b) nothing at all. Most teams were using Google Sheets, Notion, and Slack reminders to manage compliance for products handling millions of dollars.
The moment it clicked
I was having coffee with Jordan, who would become my co-founder. Jordan had been building ML systems at a large tech company and was fascinated by the emerging capabilities of large language models for understanding complex, specialized text.
I described the compliance problem. Jordan described the AI capabilities. And we both had the same thought: what if an AI could read and understand financial regulations the way a compliance officer does — and then automate all the manual work that follows?
Not replace compliance professionals. Augment them. Handle the evidence collection, the regulatory monitoring, the control mapping, the documentation generation — so compliance teams could focus on the judgment-heavy work that actually requires human expertise.
Building for compliance professionals, not against them
From day one, we made a critical decision: we would build StackTalk with compliance professionals, not just for them. We hired experienced compliance officers before we wrote a line of code. We spent months shadowing compliance teams at fintechs and banks, understanding their workflows at a granular level.
What we learned shaped everything about the product. Compliance professionals don't want a black-box AI that tells them what to do. They want a system that handles the tedious work, surfaces the important information, and then gets out of the way so they can apply their judgment. That's exactly what we built.
Where we are today
StackTalk is now live in production, helping fintechs and banks across digital banking, lending, payments, and embedded finance. Our customers are launching products faster, spending less on compliance, and — most importantly — their compliance teams are happier. They're doing strategic work instead of spreadsheet work.
We're just getting started. The opportunity to transform compliance from a cost center into a competitive advantage is enormous, and we're building the team and technology to make it happen.
If this story resonates — whether you're a compliance professional, a fintech operator, or an engineer who wants to work on hard problems that matter — we'd love to hear from you.
— Alex Rivera, Co-Founder & CEO