Eight Years in FinTech. Zero Tools for Myself.

Aswin Varghese — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 06:51:09 +0000

There's a particular irony in spending your career building tools that help people make better financial decisions — and not having any of those tools for yourself.

That's exactly where I've been for eight years.

The Comfortable Trap

I'm a Lead Engineer at a global FinTech firm. My day job involves building the infrastructure that wealth management platforms run on — portfolio dashboards, brokerage integrations, API gateways, rendering pipelines under real load. The engineering problems are interesting. The domain is one I respect. I'm good at it.

But here's what I noticed somewhere around year five: everything I built faced outward. Toward institutional clients. Toward scale. Toward other people's money.

What I built at work	What I had for myself
Portfolio tracking dashboards	A spreadsheet
Real-time market data pipelines	Manual checks when I remembered
Brokerage API integrations	A standard retail app
Risk analysis systems	Gut feel

I'm a long-term investor by habit. Index funds, SIPs — the patient approach that works if you stay disciplined and resist the urge to watch the screen too much. I believed in that strategy. I still do.

But there's a whole other side to markets I'd always watched from a distance: active trading, with its own signal logic, risk management, and tight feedback loops. The market has a grammar. I knew enough about systems to know I hadn't learned it.

So for years, curiosity sat in the background. I understood FinTech infrastructure deeply. I just never turned it inward.

The Decision That Changed Things

The software industry has been going through a period of rapid, unsettling change. New capabilities arriving faster than most teams can absorb. Roles and workflows shifting in real time. The familiar but uncomfortable feeling of a landscape changing underneath you mid-career.

For me, that uncertainty became a prompt rather than a reason to wait.

The question wasn't whether to use new technology. It was whether to use it on someone else's problem — or finally start on my own.

I've spent years working closely with the kind of technology driving these changes. I understand how it works, where it's reliable, and critically, where it isn't. The honest response was to stop observing and start building — using the skills I have, in a domain I understand, to build something that actually serves a purpose.

Not a side project for the CV. Something I'd genuinely use.

What I'm Building

The first piece is a trading analysis and alert system for Indian markets — built for the specific nuances of NSE, SEBI constraints, and the kinds of macro events that matter here and nowhere else. It runs autonomously, surfaces signals to Telegram, and paper-trades before any real capital is involved. That last part is non-negotiable.

Here's how the signal pipeline works at a high level:

But the trading system is just the first layer. The broader intent is a connected ecosystem — each piece solving a different part of the same problem: what does it actually mean to manage money well, not just monitor it?

None of it is finished. Most of it is in early stages. That's the whole point of writing about it here.

Why Indian Markets Specifically

A few things make Indian equities a uniquely interesting problem space, and why off-the-shelf Western tools don't cut it:

SEBI regulations — strict intraday rules, circuit breakers, and position limits that most global trading frameworks don't account for
NSE-specific signals — bulk deals, FII/DII flows, promoter pledging disclosures that move prices in ways that don't appear in standard technical analysis
News sensitivity — RBI policy, earnings season, GST data — all market-moving events on a different calendar than global markets
The retail infrastructure gap — institutional players have sophisticated tooling. Retail investors get generic apps. There's a lot of space in between

Eight years of building for institutions showed me exactly what good tooling looks like. Building it for Indian retail — for myself first — is a different problem worth solving.

What This Blog Will Be

Every week I'll post a short build log: what was shipped, what broke, what I had to rethink. No product launches. No metrics I don't have yet. Just honest notes from someone building in a domain they respect, with stakes that are real.

I've spent eight years building financial infrastructure for other people.

This is the part where I build it for myself.