The problem ElektraGo was solving is specific and real: millions of Hispanic users in the United States want to send money to family in Mexico and other Latin American countries without visiting a bank branch in person. Opening a US bank account digitally, as a recent immigrant or an underbanked user, is harder than it should be. ElektraGo was built to remove that friction.
Axented has been ElektraGo's engineering partner since August 2021, delivering the full product — web, iOS, and Android — from scratch, and embedding with the client's internal teams to sustain momentum through a complex, regulation-gated launch process.
Fintech products live or dies on correctness. A standard consumer app can absorb a few bugs in a weekly release — users are annoyed, the team patches it, the world moves on. A cross-border payment product that misroutes a transaction, fails to complete a money transfer, or creates an inconsistent account state has a different cost profile. The user lost money. Trust is gone. The regulatory relationship with the sponsoring bank is at risk.
That context shaped how we built. Security-by-design from the first architecture conversation, not added at the end. Fintech-grade engineering standards across the full stack. And a delivery model that could keep shipping while the external banking approval process — which is entirely outside engineering's control — ran in parallel.
The Axented team embedded with ElektraGo's internal organization: six to eight people depending on phase, combining frontend, backend, mobile (iOS/Android), architecture, UX/UI, and project management. The operating model was client-led program management with Axented providing the execution. Daily coordination via Slack and Zoom. Sprint governance in monday.com.
This structure — Axented engineers as an integrated part of the client team rather than a separate vendor — is a deliberate choice on engagements of this type. When a fintech product is being built for the first time, the people building it need full context of the product decisions, not just the tickets assigned to them.
The sponsoring bank approval required to launch a fintech product in the US is a significant dependency: months of regulatory review, documentation, and compliance verification that happens entirely outside the engineering workstream. The standard approach — wait for approval, then build — loses months of time. The Axented approach: structure the delivery so that the engineering work progresses to production readiness ahead of the banking approval, positioning the product for immediate launch once clearance is granted.
That parallel-track model requires discipline. Engineering decisions made in advance of regulatory clarity need to be made with flexibility built in — the compliance requirements that emerge during the approval process may require architectural adjustments. Building a system that's too rigid to absorb those adjustments is a failure mode. Building one so flexible it has no real design is another.
For a product handling account access and cross-border money movement, the security architecture is not a feature — it's the foundation everything else runs on. We provided senior security architecture expertise alongside the product development work: secure design patterns for financial data handling, platform hardening, and operational readiness review before anything touched production.
The architecture and security work was delivered alongside the product, not at the end of it. Security found during production is expensive. Security designed into the system from the start is part of the delivery.
ElektraGo is an ongoing engagement. Since August 2021, the relationship has evolved from initial product build to sustained delivery and team augmentation — supporting the client's internal engineering organization with additional capacity, technical expertise, and recruiting support to build the internal team over time.
The Executive VP of Fraternitas described the relationship: "The technical team is remarkable; they're definitely more talented than other software companies." The result of nearly four years of ongoing collaboration is a product built to fintech-grade standards, a launch-ready platform, and an internal team that has grown with support from Axented throughout.
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