Built to Raise: Fintech Product Strategies with Sophia Kleshchuk

As global fintech funding shows signs of recovery, startups face growing pressure to demonstrate more than just market opportunity—they need to prove product-market fit. Sophia Kleshchuk, an expert in business development and product strategy, says fintech platforms targeting institutional clients must navigate risk-averse industries, reduce onboarding friction, and build with investor expectations in mind.

Global fintech funding fell 48% in 2023 to $51.2 billion, according to CB Insights. Although Q1 2025 saw a modest 9% uptick, investors remain selective, backing startups with clear go-to-market plans and lean, scalable products. The question many founders now face: how do you build to raise—and scale—under pressure?

Understanding the Institutional Layer Cake

Kleshchuk's most recent work involved a deep dive into a trading-focused fintech platform for institutional clients—a space where buying decisions are made at the executive level, but daily users are traders who inherit the tools, not choose them.

"You're selling to one level and designing for another," she explained. "So your platform must appeal to both. The decision-maker wants to hear about ROI and risk mitigation. The trader is thinking about what's going to slow him down at 6:45 a.m. on a high-volume day."

To bridge that gap, Kleshchuk emphasizes user empathy—especially when it comes to legacy workflows that new systems often disrupt.

"Behavioral change is one of the hardest things to achieve in any organization," she said. "Traders are used to doing things a certain way for 20 years. Even if it's inefficient, it's comfortable."

One recurring issue is data formatting. "Traders were using multiple platforms daily, each with its own export format," she said. "They'd spend time in Excel just reformatting dates, so building an auto-populating system to eliminate that step was a natural solution. It saved hours of weekly grunt work—and made adoption smoother."

Lean vs. Over-Engineered: A Balancing Act

For early-stage fintechs, deciding how much to build before launching can be a trap.

"If you over-engineer your MVP to satisfy every possible use case, you'll burn your budget and end up with a bloated product that's still not quite right," Kleshchuk said. "But if you go too lean, clients won't give you feedback, and that's fatal for iteration."

Instead, she advocates for strategic listening. "We'd go into conversations with traders and decision-makers separately," she said. "To the execs, we'd ask: Where are you leaving money on the table? To traders, we'd ask: 'What's annoying you daily?'"

One trader complaint—a need to cross-reference multiple IDs across platforms—resulted in a simple but powerful feature: inputting a single ID would now pull all associated data across systems.

"It's about showing users that your platform understands their reality," Kleshchuk said. "That earns you time, feedback, and ultimately, loyalty."

The Power of Community and Relationships

In traditionally conservative verticals like institutional finance, Kleshchuk has found one unexpected advantage: integrated user communities.

"These people talk. They've worked together. They share frustrations," she said. "By building relationships within that network, we got better feedback loops and even earned what I call a 'patience credit'—users were willing to stick with us while we iterated."

This kind of organic trust-building, she argues, is just as crucial as a killer pitch deck when it comes to raising capital.

"Investors look for traction, yes, but also for signs that you understand your market deeply," she said. "Having that direct line to user pain points, and being able to show how you're solving them, that's what closes rounds."

Investor-Ready by Design

Kleshchuk believes it isn't just about elegant UX or fast onboarding—it's about building from day one with the investor lens in mind.

"You're not just building a product," she said. "You're building a story—one where every feature, every design decision, points toward market validation, growth potential, and capital efficiency."

As fintech startups navigate a post-hype world, those who survive—and thrive—will be the ones who build with precision and empathy. Kleshchuk's track record suggests that doing both isn't just possible. It's fundable.