NYC FINTECH & ENTERPRISE
Regulated Code, Uncharted Architecture: The NYC Engineering Paradox
Every line is audited. Every change is reviewed. But nobody can show you the complete data flow from user input to database. That's the gap regulators are starting to notice.
NYC Financial Services Code Analysis
What We Found in Regulated Codebases
Based on LOOM analysis of codebases from NYC financial services companies, 2024-2025.
The Compliance Documentation Gap
Financial services codebases have extensive documentation. Change logs. Audit trails. SOC 2 reports. But ask a simple question—"show me every path a user's SSN takes through our system"—and watch the scramble begin.
Compliance documentation describes what should happen. Codebases encode what actually happens. These diverge faster than anyone admits.
LOOM doesn't replace compliance documentation. It shows you what the code is actually doing—so your documentation can finally match reality.
What We See in NYC Codebases
The Compliance Layer Cake
PCI on one layer. SOX on another. GDPR on a third. Each compliance initiative added its own abstraction. Now a single database write goes through seven middleware functions nobody fully understands.
Common in: Any fintech older than 3 years
The Vendor Integration Spaghetti
Plaid. Stripe. Bloomberg. Reuters. Markit. Each vendor integration was "temporary." Now they're load-bearing, undocumented, and the engineer who built them works at a hedge fund.
Risk: Single vendor outage cascades unpredictably
The Audit Trail That Auditors Can't Follow
You log everything. But when regulators ask "which functions can modify this record?" you're back to grep and guesswork. The logs show what happened. Not what could happen.
Gap: Potential paths vs. actual logs
The Microservices Money Maze
You broke up the monolith. Great. Now a single transaction touches 23 services. Tracing a bug means correlating logs across services owned by three different teams in two time zones.
Seen in: Every fintech that "did microservices right"
Across Manhattan and Beyond
Flatiron / Union Square
Fintech startup central. Series A through IPO. Fast-moving codebases with regulatory requirements that don't move fast at all.
Midtown / FiDi
Legacy financial institutions. COBOL to cloud migrations. Systems that can't go down and can't be fully understood.
Brooklyn Tech Triangle
Adtech, media tech, emerging fintech. Younger codebases with older problems—just compressed into a shorter timeline.
When LOOM Makes Sense (And When It Doesn't)
Skip If...
- You're a 5-person team with a codebase everyone understands
- Your compliance team can already trace any data flow in under an hour
- You're building something entirely new with no legacy constraints
Essential If...
- Regulators ask questions your architecture diagrams can't answer
- Your microservices have become micro-mysteries
- A single engineer leaving would create compliance blind spots
See the Data Flows Regulators Will Ask About
Start with our free Browser Security Scanner—the same technology that powers LOOM's code analysis. Then join the waitlist for early access.