PRD Template for Fintech Products

Example: "Small business owners processing 200+ monthly invoices spend an average of 14 hours per month on manual reconciliation between their bank feed and accounting software. 23% of transactions require manual categorization, leading to an estimated $2,400/year in bookkeeper costs per business. Existing bank integrations update once daily, causing a 24-hour blind spot in cash flow visibility that leads to 8% of businesses overdrafting at least once per quarter."

Example: "Primary: Achieve real-time bank transaction syncing (under 30-second delay) for 95% of connected accounts within 90 days of launch. Secondary: Reduce manual reconciliation time from 14 hours/month to under 2 hours/month for the median user. Compliance gate: Pass SOC 2 Type II audit before public launch. Financial target: Reach $50K MRR within 6 months of GA."

Example: "As a small business owner, I want to connect my Chase business checking account so that transactions appear in my dashboard within 60 seconds of clearing. Acceptance criteria: OAuth-based connection flow completes in under 3 steps; failed connections show a specific error message with retry instructions; connected account displays last 90 days of transaction history; user can disconnect the account at any time and all cached transaction data is purged within 24 hours."

Example: "FR-1: The system must support ACH debit and credit transfers with amounts from $0.01 to $999,999.99 USD. FR-2: All monetary calculations must use fixed-point arithmetic with 2 decimal places; rounding follows banker's rounding (round half to even). FR-3: Transfer initiation must be idempotent — duplicate requests with the same idempotency key within 24 hours must return the original response without creating a second transfer. FR-4: The system must support real-time balance checks via Plaid API before initiating any debit transfer."

Example: "CR-1: PCI DSS Level 1 compliance required for all card data handling. No raw card numbers stored in application database; all card data tokenized via Stripe. CR-2: BSA/AML — implement transaction monitoring for patterns exceeding $10,000 aggregate daily volume per user. File SARs within 30 days of detection. CR-3: Reg E — provide users with electronic fund transfer disclosures before first transaction; support error resolution within 10 business days of reported unauthorized transfer. CR-4: State money transmitter licenses required in all 50 states before consumer launch (or partnership with licensed sponsor bank)."

Example: "SEC-1: All PII and financial data encrypted at rest using AES-256. Encryption keys managed via AWS KMS with automatic annual rotation. SEC-2: All API communication over TLS 1.3; TLS 1.2 accepted as fallback; TLS 1.1 and below rejected. SEC-3: Multi-factor authentication required for all actions involving money movement or account settings changes. SEC-4: Session tokens expire after 15 minutes of inactivity; refresh tokens expire after 7 days. SEC-5: Rate limiting: 10 login attempts per hour per IP; account locked after 5 consecutive failures with email notification."

Example: "Adoption: Monthly active users completing at least one transaction. Baseline: 0. Target: 5,000 within 6 months. Financial: Net revenue per user after interchange and processing costs. Target: $4.50/user/month by month 9. Compliance: Time to resolve suspicious activity alerts. Target: under 48 hours for 95% of alerts. Fraud: False positive rate on transaction monitoring. Target: under 5% within 90 days of tuning."

Example: "Phase 1 (Weeks 1-4): Core ledger and account management. Milestone: Double-entry ledger passing 100% of test scenarios. Phase 2 (Weeks 5-8): Bank integration via Plaid. Milestone: OAuth connection flow working with top 5 banks. Phase 3 (Weeks 9-12): Compliance implementation — KYC flow, transaction monitoring, audit logging. Milestone: Internal compliance review passed. Phase 4 (Weeks 13-16): SOC 2 Type I audit. Milestone: Audit report received. Phase 5 (Weeks 17-18): Beta launch with 100 users under regulatory sandbox."

Example: "Risk: Plaid API deprecates the endpoint we depend on for balance checks. Likelihood: Low. Impact: Critical — blocks all debit transfers. Mitigation: Abstract bank data provider behind an internal interface; maintain fallback integration with MX. Owner: Platform team lead. Risk: State regulator issues cease-and-desist for operating without money transmitter license in a state we overlooked. Likelihood: Medium. Impact: Critical. Mitigation: Engage fintech regulatory counsel to audit state-by-state requirements before launch; use sponsor bank model to operate under their licenses. Owner: Legal."

Example: "Dependency 1: Plaid — account linking and transaction data. SLA: 99.9% uptime. Contract status: Signed. Fallback: MX (integration not started). Dependency 2: Stripe — payment processing. SLA: 99.99% uptime. Contract: Active. No fallback planned. Dependency 3: Alloy — KYC/identity verification. SLA: 99.5% uptime. Contract: In negotiation. Fallback: Manual review process for first 500 users. Dependency 4: Unit — banking-as-a-service (sponsor bank). SLA: 99.9%. Contract: Signed. No fallback — switching BaaS providers requires 3-6 month migration."