Custom Software Development for Financial Services Company
- Custom Software Development
- Less than $10,000
- May - July 2025
- Quality
- 0.5
- Schedule
- 0.5
- Cost
- 0.5
- Willing to Refer
- 0.5
"Their lack of accountability and follow-through was honestly baffling."
- Financial services
- Amsterdam, Netherlands
- 11-50 Employees
- Online Review
- Verified
Pinely International developed an internal platform for a financial services company. The team also built the backend infrastructure and provided QA support.
Pinely International failed to deliver a functional platform, resulting in a project that was plagued by technical missteps and a lack of accountability. The team had poor project management and provided no meaningful supervision or QC. Moreover, the team ghosted the client after the fact.
The client submitted this review online.
BACKGROUND
Please describe your company and position.
I am the CTO of a financial services company.
Describe what your company does in a single sentence.
Bookkeeping for sole proprietorships and freelancers
OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE
What specific goals or objectives did you hire Pinely International to accomplish?
Develop a secure internal platform to connect and synchronize financial transactions between our system and various third-party bank APIs (e.g., GoCardless and Ponto).
Ensure reliable storage and deduplication of bank transactions across different providers using unique identifiers or fallback mechanisms.
Build and maintain a scalable, production-ready backend infrastructure that could safely handle sensitive financial data.
Provide ongoing support and QA to ensure the system remained stable during and after deployment — particularly during customer onboarding phases.
SOLUTION
How did you find Pinely International?
Referral
Why did you select Pinely International over others?
High ratings
Pricing fit our budget
Good value for cost
How many teammates from Pinely International were assigned to this project?
2-5 Employees
Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.
Pinely International was engaged to help build and support part of the internal infrastructure for our finance-focused platform. The work involved extending our backend functionality to support banking integrations through the GoCardless and Ponto APIs, enabling internal staff and clients to connect their bank accounts and retrieve financial transaction data in a stable and scalable way.
The system was not public-facing SaaS, but a business-critical internal product used for managing and reconciling financial data. The emphasis was on stability, accuracy, and future extensibility.
RESULTS & FEEDBACK
What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?
There were no measurable positive outcomes from this collaboration. The project was plagued by technical missteps, poor supervision, and a total lack of accountability. Deliverables were either broken, misconfigured, or caused regressions in existing functionality.
Key issues:
Critical flaws in transaction storage due to incorrect assumptions about the API response structure.
Broken customer onboarding because environments weren’t properly configured for production.
Duplicate and missing transactions that I had to manually debug and resolve.
Frontend errors in production leading to failed customer bank connections — with no urgency shown to fix them.
Core features were broken, including transaction syncing and storage logic — some based on simple oversights like incorrect assumptions about available API fields. No QA practices were in place. In the final weeks, I had to personally take over development just to get the system into a functional state.
Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?
At first glance, everything seemed to be going well. The frontend looked nice, the communication was calm, and the meetings were short and positive. No serious issues were raised initially, and I was under the impression that things were under control.
However, once we reached a more complex phase of the project — closer to the actual production launch — it became painfully clear that there was a lack of deeper technical understanding and oversight from the project management side. The designated project manager remained passive during a week of escalating issues, failed to spot critical red flags, and did not offer any technical direction to help resolve problems. Even after explicitly asking for more support, there was minimal involvement.
In the final days before onboarding customers, I ended up working until late into the night — including weekends — writing and fixing large parts of the backend code myself. This was not due to scope creep or extra feature requests, but because their team had failed to properly architect and test critical parts of the system. I don’t even have a formal background in computer science, yet I had to step in to debug and patch core functionality, just to prevent a failed launch. That’s unacceptable for a company that claims to offer software development services.
In short, their project management was superficial at best. There was no quality assurance process, no proactive identification of risk, and no sense of accountability when things clearly started to go wrong.
When it mattered most — during the week of our production onboarding — critical issues were unresolved. We only made it through because I worked 60+ hours that week, including late nights, fixing bugs that should never have passed development.
Despite a low hourly rate, the value delivered was worse than zero, because not only did we pay for the work, we also incurred additional costs (financial and reputational) fixing it ourselves.
What was your primary form of communication with Pinely International?
Virtual Meeting
Email or Messaging App
What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?
Unfortunately, what stood out most was the way they managed to completely derail the project — despite multiple opportunities to make things right. We encountered critical bugs that should have been caught during development, I had to take over much of the debugging and programming myself (despite not having a computer science background), and during the most critical phase, I worked late nights just to prevent a total launch failure.
What made this particularly disappointing was that even after all this, we gave them a fair and professional opportunity to repair the damage and continue the collaboration — which they agreed to — only for them to completely ghost us afterward. Their lack of accountability and follow-through was honestly baffling.
Despite confirming over a call that they would resolve the outstanding problems and continue with a new project, they simply ghosted us afterward and never responded to our follow-up emails. When a team not only mismanages a high-stakes project but then disappears after agreeing to fix their mistakes, that crosses a line. It shows a complete lack of professionalism and reliability — especially for a product dealing with sensitive financial data. We strongly recommend steering clear of this company
Even after raising serious concerns and offering multiple opportunities to reset the relationship and move forward, the team ghosted us. The lack of ownership, accountability, and technical leadership made this a costly and exhausting experience.
Are there any areas for improvement or something Pinely International could have done differently?
Absolutely. There are several areas where Pinely International fell short and could drastically improve:
Technical Due Diligence: Many of the issues we encountered stemmed from basic oversights — for instance, failing to read API documentation carefully, incorrectly mapping response fields, or not ensuring production configuration readiness. A more experienced or better-supervised team would have avoided these problems altogether.
Oversight of Subcontractors: Pinely outsources a significant portion of its work to developers in low-wage countries (in our case, Africa), which is not inherently an issue. However, they provided no meaningful supervision or quality control. The developer we worked with, while dedicated, lacked the support and senior technical guidance to handle the complexity of the project.
Accountability from Leadership: When things started going wrong, senior staff did not step in. Their project manager was absent when we needed leadership most — offering no direction, no check-ins, and no critical thinking to resolve roadblocks. Ultimately, I had to take over debugging and development myself, despite not having a background in computer science.
Communication and Transparency: After agreeing on a plan to resolve issues and continue the collaboration, the team simply stopped responding. They ghosted us — despite knowing we were still dealing with live bugs that were affecting our customers and incurring direct costs.
Commitment to Resolution: We gave them multiple chances to take ownership, fix the problems, and rebuild trust. Not only did they not act on those opportunities, but they also failed to follow through on basic communication — even after their CEO personally committed to delivering a response by a specific date.
In short, the lack of technical oversight, leadership accountability, and professional follow-through makes them a risky partner for any project that’s high-stakes or mission-critical.
RATINGS
-
Quality
0.5Service & Deliverables
"The quality of the delivered product was far below any reasonable expectation."
-
Schedule
0.5On time / deadlines
"Timelines were vague, and delivery was chaotic."
-
Cost
0.5Value / within estimates
"Even our GoCardless billing increased due to broken bank connections that weren’t stored properly."
-
Willing to Refer
0.5NPS
"We gave Pinely multiple opportunities to fix the serious technical and organizational issues they had caused.
