What this looks like in practice

The Situation

Fora Financial is a business lending company that has facilitated over $4 billion in funding to small and mid-sized businesses. As the company scaled, it faced a challenge common to fintech lenders: loan approval processes that relied on manual review were becoming a bottleneck — slow, inconsistent, and difficult to audit in a regulated environment.

The company needed senior technical leadership to own the architecture decisions, drive AI/ML implementation, and ensure every change stayed within compliance boundaries. Hiring a full-time CTO for a scoped transformation initiative was neither fast enough nor the right fit for the engagement.

What the CTO Actually Did

A fractional CTO was brought in to provide technology leadership across three interconnected workstreams.

AI/ML implementation for loan approval optimisation. Designed and oversaw the implementation of machine learning models to support loan approval decisions — improving consistency, reducing manual review time, and creating an auditable decision trail required by financial regulators.

Technology leadership and architecture ownership. Provided strategic direction for the engineering team, ensuring the technical stack could support the AI layer without requiring a full rebuild of existing infrastructure. This meant sequencing work correctly — so the team wasn’t building on a foundation that would need to change again in six months.

Compliance management. In regulated lending, every technical change has a compliance dimension. The fractional CTO bridged the gap between engineering decisions and regulatory requirements — ensuring the AI-assisted decision process met the documentation and auditability standards expected by financial regulators.

The Outcome

The engagement delivered working AI/ML implementation within the compliance framework, with the engineering team executing against a clear technical direction. Fora Financial was able to move forward with AI-assisted loan approvals without compromising its regulatory standing.

Why This Matters for Fintech Founders

If you are building in a regulated space — lending, payments, insurance, or banking infrastructure — the cost of getting the architecture wrong is not just technical debt. It is potential regulatory exposure, failed compliance audits, and investor due diligence findings that delay or kill your fundraise.

A CTO in a fintech context is not only a technical role. It is a risk management role. The value is not in writing code — it is in making sure the code your team writes does not create problems that take twelve months and a significant budget to unwind.

Allikas:SOLTECH case study

The Situation

RightEye is a health technology company building an eye-tracking platform — a product that sits at the intersection of medical diagnostics, software, and hardware integration. The CEO, Adam Gross, had a clear product vision and understood the market opportunity. What the company needed was a technical leader who could translate that vision into sound architecture decisions, build the right team around it, and keep the security and compliance requirements of a health platform in check.

The company was not looking for someone to write code. It was looking for someone who could make sure the right code got written — and that the foundation being built would not become a liability as the product scaled.

What the CTO Actually Did

SaaS architecture and security. Defined the architecture for the platform with a focus on security — a non-negotiable requirement for any software handling health-related data. This meant making early decisions about data storage, access controls, and system design that would be far more expensive to change later.

Technology evaluation and vendor selection. Assessed the technology options available — build vs. buy decisions, third-party integrations, infrastructure choices — and provided the CEO with clear recommendations grounded in both technical merit and business context.

Strategic vision alignment. Ensuring the technical roadmap stayed connected to the company’s growth goals. When a founder and a CTO are not aligned, engineering effort drifts — teams build the right things in the wrong order, or technically correct things that do not move the business forward.

The Outcome

“Serving as our fractional CTO, Frank understood our business and growth goals. He provided the foresight of what we needed to meet our company’s technology vision.” — Adam Gross, CEO, RightEye

The platform was built on a secure, scalable foundation appropriate for a health technology product. The company had technical leadership it could rely on without carrying the overhead of a full-time executive hire during a phase where the roadmap was still being validated.

Why This Matters for SaaS Founders

The most common mistake at the seed and early Series A stage is treating architecture as something you can sort out later. The decisions made in the first twelve months — data models, infrastructure choices, how you handle authentication and access, how you structure your API — are not easily reversed. A CTO’s job at this stage is to make those decisions correctly the first time, or at minimum to make them in a way that preserves optionality.

What Adam Gross described — “foresight of what we needed” — is exactly what a senior technical leader provides. Not execution. Foresight.

Allikas:Ten Mile Square

The Situation

The company’s long-standing CTO resigned. No succession plan was in place.

In the weeks that followed, the CFO and COO attempted to absorb IT responsibilities alongside their existing roles. The result was predictable: IT projects stalled, infrastructure decisions were deferred, and the organisation lost its ability to communicate clearly about the state of its technology — internally or with stakeholders.

This is a pattern that plays out in companies of every size. The CTO role is often invisible when it is functioning well. When it disappears, the gap becomes immediately visible — not in the codebase, but in the conversations that stop happening: project status updates, vendor decisions, roadmap prioritisation, security reviews.

What the CTO Actually Did

A fractional CTO was engaged to restore operational clarity as quickly as possible.

Stakeholder interviews and IT assessment. Conducted structured interviews across departments to map the current state: what was working, what was stalled, where the technical knowledge had walked out the door with the previous CTO.

Strengths and weaknesses mapping. Produced a clear picture of the organisation’s IT posture — not as a lengthy audit document, but as actionable input for the leadership team. What needs immediate attention. What can wait. What is at risk.

Roadmap creation. Gave the organisation a plan it could communicate — internally to staff, and externally to board members and other stakeholders who had grown accustomed to clear technical reporting.

The Outcome

Within 90 days:

• Clear communication restored across all IT projects
• Stakeholder engagement with IT reached its highest recorded level
• The organisation moved from reactive firefighting to forward-looking roadmap execution

The engagement continued long-term, with the fractional CTO providing ongoing leadership without the overhead of a permanent executive hire — appropriate for an organisation whose technology needs were real but did not require daily CTO-level attention.

Why This Matters for Founders and Boards

The departure of a technical leader is one of the highest-risk events for a technology-dependent organisation. It is not just the loss of a person — it is the loss of context: the undocumented decisions, the vendor relationships, the understanding of why the system works the way it does.

The 90-day outcome here was not achieved by writing code. It was achieved by asking the right questions, listening carefully, and giving the organisation a structure it could operate within. That is what senior technical leadership looks like in practice.

Allikas:Solvaria case study

The Situation

A startup was spending $90,000 per month on cloud infrastructure. The engineering team was busy building product. Nobody was looking at the bill.

This is not an unusual situation. In the early stages of a company, infrastructure is provisioned to make things work — not to make things efficient. Cloud providers are designed to make it easy to spin up capacity and hard to notice when that capacity is no longer needed, oversized, or simply misconfigured.

The monthly spend had grown organically alongside the product. Nobody had taken a step back to ask whether it reflected the company’s actual requirements.

What the CTO Actually Did

A fractional CTO was brought in to conduct an infrastructure audit — a structured review of what the company was running, why, and whether it was appropriately sized and configured.

Cloud infrastructure audit. Mapped the full infrastructure footprint: compute, storage, networking, databases, third-party services. Identified resources that were running but not being used, instances sized for peak load that never arrived, and configurations that were reasonable at an earlier stage but had not been revisited.

Cost optimisation and rightsizing. Worked with the engineering team to implement changes: rightsizing instances, removing unused resources, renegotiating reserved capacity, consolidating overlapping services.

Ongoing governance. Established a process for infrastructure review so the situation would not recur — so the team would have visibility into costs before they became a problem rather than after.

The Outcome

Monthly cloud infrastructure cost reduced from $90,000 to $20,000 — a 78% reduction. The reduction was achieved without degrading performance or reliability. The money freed up went back into the business.

Why This Matters for Early-Stage Founders

Cloud cost is one of the most common silent drains on early-stage company budgets. It is not visible in the same way that headcount costs are. It tends to grow gradually and is rarely reviewed systematically.

The math is straightforward. An engagement that costs $10,000–$15,000 per month, if it finds and fixes a $70,000/month infrastructure problem, pays for itself many times over in the first month alone.

But the broader point is not about cloud cost specifically. It is about what happens when a company does not have senior technical leadership with the time and mandate to look at the whole system. Individual engineers optimise for the things they are responsible for. Nobody optimises for the whole. A CTO’s job is to look at the whole.

Allikas:STG Consulting case study

The Situation

Rendevor provides dialysis solutions to hospitals, correctional systems, and post-acute care facilities — environments where clinical decisions depend on accurate, timely data and where the consequences of poor information flow are measured in patient outcomes.

The company was managing its reporting manually. Clinical data was being captured and assembled by hand — a process that was slow, error-prone, and impossible to scale. Leadership was making decisions based on information that was hours or days old by the time it reached them.

The technical challenge was not just building software. It was building software that could operate reliably in the clinical environments Rendevor served, integrate with existing workflows, and meet the regulatory requirements of healthcare data handling.

What the CTO Actually Did

A fractional CTO and technical leadership team were brought in to own the architecture and lead development from end to end.

Architecture definition. Designed the system architecture with the requirements of the clinical environment in mind: reliability, security, data integrity, and the need to integrate with existing care workflows rather than replace them.

Full-stack development leadership. Led the engineering effort to build and deliver the platform — managing the development process, sequencing the work, and keeping quality consistent across the stack.

Manual-to-digital reporting transformation. Replaced manual data collection and reporting with automated scorecards and dashboards. Clinical and operational data that previously required manual assembly was now captured, aggregated, and surfaced in real time.

The Outcome

Leadership gained access to real-time, high-quality operational data. Decision-making became faster and more reliable. The manual reporting burden was eliminated from clinical staff workflows, allowing them to focus on care delivery rather than data assembly.

The platform delivered a clear before/after: from decisions made on yesterday’s numbers to decisions made on now.

Why This Matters for Regulated Industry Founders

Healthcare, like fintech, has a compliance layer that sits beneath every technical decision. The wrong data architecture is not just a technical problem — it can be a HIPAA problem, an audit problem, or a liability problem.

What made this engagement successful was not the technology itself. It was the combination of technical depth and domain awareness — understanding that in a clinical environment, the data pipeline needs to be correct before it needs to be fast, and that the stakeholders who will actually use the system are clinicians, not engineers.

Senior technical leadership in a regulated domain is the difference between building something that works in a demo and building something that works in a hospital.

Allikas:SeeSaw Labs

Note: This engagement was led by a fractional CISO, not a fractional CTO. The pattern — external senior technical leadership enabling enterprise sales — is directly applicable to CTO engagements in fintech and regulated sectors.

The Situation

Incentiv had built a product that enterprise clients wanted. The problem was that enterprise clients — particularly those in financial services and global organisations — require security and compliance evidence before they will sign a contract.

Without SOC 2 certification, Incentiv could not enter the procurement process at the companies it was targeting. The product existed. The market existed. The blocker was a compliance credential that the team had not yet had the time or expertise to obtain.

The company faced a sequencing challenge that many B2B SaaS founders encounter: you need enterprise clients to validate the business, but enterprise clients need compliance certification to let you in the door.

What the External Technical Leader Actually Did

Endpoint management and account security. Established the foundational controls around device management and account provisioning that form the baseline for any SOC 2 audit.

Application and infrastructure security. Reviewed and hardened the application and cloud infrastructure against the security controls required for SOC 2 compliance — identifying gaps and implementing fixes in parallel with the product team’s ongoing work.

Privacy programme and GDPR compliance. Built a privacy programme alongside the SOC 2 work, ensuring the company was positioned for EU clients from day one — a requirement for any platform handling compensation data across international portfolios.

Ongoing vCISO engagement. Rather than a one-time project, the engagement transitioned to ongoing fractional leadership — maintaining the compliance posture as the company grew and its client base expanded.

The Outcome

• SOC 2 Type I achieved in 30 days
• SOC 2 Type II achieved in 120 days — before the product went live
• First enterprise clients won, with the compliance credential cited as a key factor in the buying decision

“BD Emerson helped us win our first enterprise clients due to the speed and subject matter expertise in security, privacy, IT, and compliance.” — Incentiv executive

Why This Matters for Fintech and B2B SaaS Founders

SOC 2 is the minimum entry ticket for selling to enterprise and financial services clients. These are not one-time projects. They require someone who owns the compliance posture, keeps it current, and can answer when a prospective client’s security team asks: “Who is responsible for your information security programme?”

The lesson from Incentiv is that the compliance credential is not a cost — it is a sales asset. Getting it early, before the first enterprise deal, means the door is open when the opportunity arrives rather than closed until the certification clears.

A fractional CTO or CISO with regulated industry experience is the fastest path from “we need to get compliant” to “we can close this deal.”

Allikas:BD Emerson