30 minutes · free teardown of your site · no deck, no pitch
Before you read anything — a 60-second test
Open Slack. Ask your marketer to change the price on your pricing page. Not redesign it. Just change a number.
Now time how long it takes.
If the answer is “I’ll ask the developers” — you already found one of your problems. And it isn’t the biggest one.
I’m Taras. We build brands, websites and products for fintech companies. We built the site for a fintech that’s worth nine figures today, and I’ll get to what we actually did on it at the end.
First, the stuff nobody tells you. Because in my experience it’s always the same six things.
Your site is beautiful. Custom animations. Scroll effects. A hero section that took three weeks. It looks incredible in the Figma file.
And it’s killing you.
A heavy site is a slow site. Your visitor is on 4G in a taxi. Your gradient mesh takes four seconds to load. They’re gone at two.
Nothing on it can be changed. Every section is a custom build. Want to add a case study? That’s a developer, a ticket, and two weeks.
It’s designed to be admired, not read. The eye slides down the page and lands on nothing.
You didn’t buy a website. You bought a very expensive poster.
What it costs
Every visitor who leaves at second two, and every update that never ships.
02CMS
Your CMS is a hostage situation
Back to the test at the top.
Most fintech sites can’t be edited by the people who need to edit them. Marketing wants to publish the case study from the deal you just won. It’s a three-week project. So it never goes up.
New pricing? Lives in a PDF someone emails on request.
New market opened? The site still lists three countries.
Shipped a major feature in March? The site still describes the March version. It’s September.
Your website slowly turns into a brochure about a company you used to be. And your competitor — worse product, plainer site, but their marketer can publish on a Tuesday afternoon — looks twice as alive as you do.
What it costs
The cheapest problem here to fix, and the most expensive one to keep.
03Copy
Your copy is doing nothing
Go read your homepage out loud. Right now.
I’ll guess what’s there. Fast, secure, compliant. Bank-grade security. Built for scale. Seamless integration. Trusted by industry leaders.
Every one of those is probably true about you. That’s not the point. The point is that they’re equally true-sounding coming from the worst company in your category — and your reader knows it. So they’ve stopped reading claims altogether. Their eyes move over that block the way they move over a cookie banner.
Which means the one thing you do that genuinely nobody else does is currently sitting in a paragraph shaped exactly like a lie.
Compare that to Mercury, which tells you in one word who it’s for — startups. Or Wise, which just shows you the fee. No adjectives. They tell you something. That’s the whole trick.
Design gets you three seconds. Copy does everything after. Most fintechs spend ninety percent of the budget on the three seconds.
What it costs
Your single best differentiator, currently invisible on your own homepage.
04Positioning
You built a Stripe clone
You know exactly what I mean.
Deep navy or near-black. A purple-to-teal gradient. A code snippet in a floating window. A dashboard screenshot at a fifteen-degree angle. “Infrastructure for the modern internet.”
Stripe earned that look. They spent a decade and a fortune on it. When you borrow it, you don’t look like Stripe — you look like the fourth company that week that borrowed it.
Same with Revolut. Every founder I meet wants their brand to feel like Revolut. But Revolut is a consumer bank fighting for a hundred million people. You’re probably building payments for marketplaces, or a treasury tool for logistics firms, or lending for one specific type of business.
The second you borrow their look, you stop being legible to your own market.
Nine different companies. One website.
What it costs
When a buyer can’t tell you apart by looking, all that’s left to compare is price. And someone bigger wins that.
05Discovery
ChatGPT doesn’t know you exist
This one’s newer, and most teams haven’t caught up.
A lot of your future customers will never Google you. They’ll ask ChatGPT — who are the best payment providers for European marketplaces? — and take the two or three names it gives them.
You don’t get rejected. You just aren’t in the answer. No traffic, no bounce, no session. Nothing in analytics. You’ll never know it happened.
And getting into that answer is a different job from ranking on Google. An AI quotes what it can actually read and check: clear claims, real documentation, comparison pages, prices written as text instead of a “Contact sales” button.
It can’t quote a gradient. It can’t quote “secure, scalable, compliant” — there’s nothing there to repeat.
“Who are the best payment providers for European marketplaces?”
1.
2.
3.
—Your company · not in the answer
No traffic. No bounce. No record it happened.
What it costs
A whole discovery channel, growing every month, that you’re currently invisible in.
06Compliance
One site, many regulators
Last one, and it’s specific to your industry.
Every market has its own rules about what you can claim, where you have to state your licence, and what you’re not allowed to imply. One global page written for everyone isn’t efficient. It’s exposure.
In June 2025, Sweden’s regulator pulled Intergiro’s e-money licence and gave them until September to wind down. That was a compliance and governance failure, not a website problem — but you already know how this works. What you say publicly sits on the same surface as everything else you get checked on.
Saying the wrong thing in a market where you’re not authorised to say it isn’t a copywriting mistake.
What it costs
It stops being a marketing issue and becomes a finding.
The part that should bother you
None of those six show up anywhere
There’s no dashboard line called “deals lost before the first scroll.” No alert when a partner bank’s analyst opens your site during due diligence and quietly moves you to “revisit next quarter.” No notification when your champion sends your link to their CFO and she stops replying to him.
Everything else in your business tells you when it breaks. Churn shows up. A bad integration files a ticket. A bad hire is obvious by month three.
This one is paid entirely in things that don’t happen. And things that don’t happen never make it onto a Monday agenda.
So the money goes somewhere visible instead. Another salesperson. Another feature. Another round of ads pointed at a page that leaks.
Meanwhile the leak sits at the top of the funnel, being seen by every single person who will ever consider giving you money.
What we actually do
Nothing complicated · just done in the right order
Find out who you’re not for
There are millions of fintech products. The ones that win are the ones one specific person understands in ten seconds, because it’s obviously their problem. You name that person and let everyone else leave. Founders hate this. It’s the highest-leverage decision on the list.
Write before we design
Every time. The message decides the layout, not the other way round.
Get specific instead of expensive
You can’t outspend Revolut. You can be far more specific than them, and specific is free. A named client instead of a grey logo. A real number instead of “significantly faster.” Your licence number in the footer at a size a human can read.
Build it fast and light
Speed is conversion. A slow fintech site reads as a slow fintech company.
Build it so you can edit it
A CMS your marketer uses without a course, without a ticket, without us. If you have to call your agency to change a price, you don’t own your website.
Build it so machines can read it
Structured, clear, quotable — so you show up in AI answers, not just Google.
Build the market rules in
Claims and disclosures per jurisdiction, designed in from the start, not patched after a lawyer notices.
Design comes last. That’s the part almost nobody does — and it’s the reason everything after it works.
Every one of these is a financial product
Selected work · this is the only arena we compete in
We win these. We just don’t let them decide the layout. Awards prove we can do the craft. They’re not the reason your visitor stays.
Don’t take my word for it
Verified reviews · Trustpilot
★★★★★
We engaged U1CORE to design and build our first website on an extremely tight timeline, and they delivered. The team worked around the clock to hit our deadlines and kept us in the loop the entire…
Elizabeth JepsenJun 14, 2026
★★★★★
Taras and the U1 Core team are the rare types of people who actually care about you and your project. Fantastic talent from the design perspective, and super efficient on the development side.
Zachary SuraDec 8, 2025
★★★★★
I recently worked with U1CORE on UI/UX for my project, as well as a pitch deck, and I’m genuinely impressed with how everything turned out. They were easy to work with from the start, very clear…
Kamil WojciechowskiDec 10, 2025
★★★★★
Amazing team of young professionals from Ukraine! We created a website and brand guidelines for one of my businesses together and I was very pleased with communication, quality of work…
The title says for a hundred-million-dollar company. Not that generates one.
No website generates a hundred million dollars. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something, and you should hear that whole sentence in their voice.
We built the site for a fintech that’s worth nine figures today. The product did that. The team did that. The timing did that.
What the website had to do was different, and honestly harder: make a young company look like the safest choice in the room. To the investors during diligence. To the partner banks running their checks. To the first thousand people deciding whether to move their money through it.
That’s the actual job. Not generating the money — being believed by the people who move it.
I’d rather give you a smaller claim you can check than a big one you can’t.
Want to know where yours stands?
Send me your URL. I’ll come back with the three things costing you the most — as a designer, as a marketer, and as someone who’s built these for financial companies.
