I spent two weeks last winter rewriting payment reconciliation at a 40-person startup in SoMa. The code worked, the numbers balanced — but the interface was a single hostile spreadsheet exported from a legacy banking platform. Nobody complained, because they had never seen it done differently.
The overhead you don't see
Every finance team knows this version of the story. Treasury dashboards that require three tabs and a prayer. Wire confirmations arriving as unformatted plaintext. Card controls buried four levels deep in an admin panel last redesigned in 2016. The friction compounds quietly, one confused Slack message at a time.
The real cost of bad tooling isn't engineering hours. It's the decisions you never make because the data isn't visible.
When we built Reserve, we chose to make banking feel like product, not obstacle.