There’s a version of growth every fintech IT leader knows well. Headcount doubles. New products launch. Developers spin up tools overnight. And somewhere between the Series A buzz and the first board meeting where someone asks why the software spend is up 80%, the SaaS stack quietly gets out of hand.

The good news: this isn’t inevitable. The IT teams that come out ahead aren’t the ones who slow down tool adoption. They’re the ones who make it visible, manageable, and intentional.

This is a practical playbook for fintech IT teams navigating exactly that challenge.

Viio, now part of the Matrix42 family, has worked with fast-scaling companies across Europe to bring their SaaS environments under control. Here’s what we’ve learned.

The Fintech SaaS Problem Is Different

Every scaling company accumulates SaaS. But fintech companies do it faster, and with higher stakes.

Consider what’s typical in the stack of a 100 to 300 person fintech:

• Core infrastructure: AWS or GCP, plus a constellation of monitoring, CI/CD, and security tools
• Compliance and regulatory tools: KYC/AML platforms, audit logging, data residency solutions
• Developer productivity: IDEs, code review, incident management, documentation
• Data and analytics: multiple BI platforms, data warehouses, ETL tools, often overlapping
• Operations and comms: Slack, Notion, Jira, Confluence, and all their integrations

The issue isn’t that these tools are unnecessary. Most of them are. The issue is that nobody has a complete picture of what exists, who uses it, what it costs, or when contracts renew. In fintech, where regulators care deeply about data access, vendor risk, and audit trails, that invisibility isn’t just expensive. It’s a liability.

Three Pain Points That Show Up Every Time

In conversations with IT leaders at fast-growing fintech companies, the same frustrations come up again and again.

1. Shadow IT that finance finds before IT does

A product manager signs up for a new data enrichment tool on a company card. A developer runs a new observability platform through expenses. By the time IT becomes aware, there are three separate teams paying for overlapping tools and none of them know it. In a regulated environment, this also means unknown vendors are potentially touching customer data without a security review. Shadow IT is one of the most common and costly problems for scaling fintechs and one of the hardest to catch without the right tooling. Viio’s guide to shadow IT in practice is a useful starting point for IT leaders thinking through the trade-offs.

2. Renewals that catch everyone off guard

Annual contracts automatically renew while the team that originally bought the tool has completely turned over. The tool might still be used or it might not. Either way, IT is now locked into another year with no leverage and no data to negotiate from. In fintech, where vendor contracts often include data processing agreements and SLAs, a missed renewal window can have compliance consequences on top of the financial cost.

3. License waste that nobody owns

Industry data suggests that up to 25% of SaaS spend is wasted: unused seats, abandoned accounts, redundant tools doing the same job. For IT teams without visibility into usage at the license level, there’s no way to rightsize. In fintech, where offboarding a departing employee means revoking access across dozens of tools simultaneously, stale licenses aren’t just wasteful. They’re a security risk.

What Good SaaS Management Actually Looks Like

The fintech IT teams that manage this well aren’t necessarily larger or better resourced. They’ve built a few foundational habits, the kind that Gartner highlights in their 2025 Magic Quadrant for SaaS Management Platforms as essential for controlling sprawl, risk, and cost.

A single source of truth for the stack

This sounds obvious, but most teams don’t have it. A centralised system that surfaces every vendor, every contract, every active license, enriched with actual usage data, is the foundation everything else is built on. Without it, every decision about consolidation, renewal, or offboarding is a guess.

Automated discovery, not manual audits

Quarterly SaaS audits are outdated the day they’re done. Viio’s IT focused platform uses a comprehensive discovery engine that connects to SSO providers, financial systems, browser activity, and vendor integrations to continuously surface what’s being used, including tools that were never approved to begin with. This is how IT gets ahead of shadow IT instead of chasing it.

Renewal management that gives you leverage

The teams that negotiate the best terms don’t go into renewal conversations empty-handed. They come with actual usage data: how many seats are active, how often the tool is opened, what alternatives exist. That data changes the dynamic completely. Vendors know when they have leverage, and so should IT.

Offboarding tied to the employee lifecycle

In fintech, employee offboarding is a compliance event as much as an IT task, and regulations like DORA (the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act, in force since January 2025) require that financial entities maintain full traceability of ICT vendor access and third-party risk. SaaS license management should be tied directly to the employee lifecycle so that when someone leaves, access is revoked cleanly, accounts are deprovisioned, and any customer data exposure is eliminated. Automating this removes the risk of human error and gives auditors a clean trail.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Sambla, a fintech lending company, faced exactly these challenges as it scaled. Shadow IT was proliferating, compliance visibility was limited, and the team lacked a centralised view of their vendor landscape. After implementing Viio, they were able to identify previously unknown applications, align their software governance with DORA requirements, and move to data-driven renewals. Read the full Sambla story here.

Where to Start: A Practical First Step

The instinct for many IT leaders is to wait until there’s time to do this properly: build a full business case, run an RFP, align stakeholders. But the fintech companies that get this under control usually start with something much simpler: visibility.

Before optimising anything, understand what you actually have. Map every vendor. Capture every contract. Surface who’s using what and how often. That exercise alone, done properly, will almost always surface enough waste to justify whatever comes next.

From there, the path forward becomes clear: consolidate the overlaps, right-size the underused, and go into every renewal with data.

The Bottom Line for Fintech IT

SaaS sprawl is a predictable consequence of growth. It doesn’t have to become a permanent condition.

The fintech companies that manage this well share one thing in common: they’ve treated SaaS management as a strategic capability, not an afterthought. They have visibility, process, and data, and they use it to make better decisions, negotiate from a position of strength, and stay ahead of the compliance risks that come with an unmanaged vendor landscape.

Scaling fast is the goal. Scaling costs isn’t a requirement.

Ready to take control of your SaaS stack?

To learn more about Viio and how our Matrix42 SaaS Management tool will help you establish a single source of truth across your SaaS environment, connect with our team and we’re happy to book some time to show you a path forward to true control of your SaaS stack and real savings.

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