SaaS development in Edinburgh
Wealthtech and fund-data firms in Edinburgh sell SaaS to customers who send their most valuable data on day one. A fund manager onboards by sending holdings, clients and transactions in its own formats, and expects the product to cope with every odd case in them. Each new customer arrives with a different feed, and a product that handles them with custom code per client stops scaling at about the tenth.
We build the parts that let that product grow: tenant isolation enforced in the database, configurable ingestion so a new customer's feed is a mapping rather than a code change, activity history your customers can export, and single sign-on for their staff. Onboarding a new fund manager becomes configuration and a test run, so your engineers spend their time on the product rather than on the next feed.
Edinburgh is a money town with a major research university in the middle of it, and its software work reflects both. On one side sit the fund managers, life and pensions firms and banks: Baillie Gifford, NatWest Group's headquarters at Gogarburn, and a long tail of platforms, administrators and wealth managers. On the other side sit the University of Edinburgh's informatics and data science groups, and EPCC, which hosts the national supercomputer ARCHER2 and was chosen in 2025 as home for the next one, with up to £750 million of government funding.
The financial side needs systems that are careful rather than fast. Pension and investment products carry decades of rules, and much of the administration runs on platforms that predate the people maintaining them. Customers expect to see their pot, their charges and their options clearly on a screen, and advisers expect the platform to answer as fast as the one they used yesterday. So the work is usually integration, data, reporting and customer screens around an old core, with every change tested before it ships. Fintechs sit in between, often selling back into those same banks and fund managers.
The university side needs something different: research code that works on a GPU in a lab and has to become a product that works for a paying customer. That gap, between a model that is right and a service that is reliable, is where many spin-outs stall. Hiring is competitive. ITJobsWatch puts the median advertised software engineer salary in Edinburgh at £70,000 over the six months to September 2026, on a smaller sample than London, and the banks and fund managers take many of the experienced engineers.
Working with us from Edinburgh fits the day you already have. Four hours of every working day overlap with yours, set across your morning, so stand-up, review and the decisions that follow happen live with the engineer who writes the code. The rest of the day runs on written updates and pull requests in your own Slack, GitHub and Linear, waiting for you after lunch, with runbooks and architecture notes written as the work goes.
We are the right fit for a defined piece of work, a spin-out's first production system, or a project that needs senior engineers this quarter while your own hiring catches up. Start with a fixed-price two-week piece and judge us on what ships. For agencies, we work white-label under your name, in your repositories and tools.
Four ways this arrives.
Then SCIM, then role mapping, then a security questionnaire. We add SAML and OIDC through a provider or your own identity stack, provision users from their directory, and keep the permission model working for the self-serve customers who never asked for any of it.
Shared tables with a tenant column and every query trusted to filter on it. We enforce isolation below the application, with Postgres row-level security or separate schemas, and write tests that try to read across tenants and must fail.
Moving from seats to usage, adding a free tier, or selling annual contracts beside monthly plans. We model plans and entitlements separately from the payment provider, meter usage into a ledger you can audit, and make proration and dunning tested code rather than a monthly surprise.
Every larger customer asks who changed what, who can reach production and how access ends when someone leaves. We build exportable audit logs, least-privilege access and change control through pull requests, so your answer is a screen, not a spreadsheet.
A multi-tenant platform scoped per organisation, with admin screens for users, access and login alerts, and a way for an administrator to view the app as any user.
Read the write-up →Asked by Edinburgh teams.
How do you work with teams in Edinburgh?+
Four hours of every working day overlap with yours, set across your Edinburgh morning, so stand-up and code review happen live. We join your calls and work in your tools: Slack, GitHub and Linear. You talk directly to the engineer who writes the code. The rest of the day carries on in pull requests and written updates that are waiting for you after lunch, with runbooks and architecture notes written as we go.
Do you build for Edinburgh fund managers and pensions firms?+
Yes. For pensions and investment platforms we build services around the administration core: APIs that expose what it knows, transfers and switches processed exactly once, and tools for the exception cases that live in spreadsheets today. For fund managers we build investment data pipelines that trace every figure back to its feed, research search that cites its sources, and customer screens that make pots and charges clear.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Edinburgh?+
ITJobsWatch puts the median advertised salary for a software engineer in Edinburgh at around £70,000. Our published rate is $35/hour with a $5,000 minimum, or $5,400 a month for one engineer embedded in your team. There is no recruiting time and no employment overhead, and we can start within days of the first call. A fixed-price two-week piece at $2,800 lets you judge us on output first.
Can you work with a university spin-out?+
Yes, and it is a good fit. Spin-outs usually have strong research code and nobody whose job is running it in production. The research team stays in charge of the science, and we build what surrounds it: the API, the data handling, the deployment and the monitoring. A fixed-price two-week piece fits a grant or accelerator budget, and the code belongs to the company from the first commit.
Shared database, separate schemas, or a database per tenant?+
Shared tables with row-level security for most products, because it is the cheapest to run and the simplest to migrate. Separate schemas or databases when a customer contractually needs isolation, data kept in a particular region, or its own backup schedule. We design so a large tenant can move to its own database later without rewriting the application, because that request usually arrives with the biggest contract.
When should we add SSO and SCIM?+
Before the deal that needs them, not in the first month. Design the user and organisation model so SSO slots in without a data migration, then switch it on when a paying customer asks. A provider such as WorkOS saves you building SAML and SCIM yourself, which rarely pays off until enterprise customers are a large share of your revenue.
Stripe, or a merchant of record like Paddle?+
Stripe gives you the most control over plans, invoices and the checkout. A merchant of record such as Paddle takes a larger fee and becomes the seller, handling tax wherever you sell. For a small team selling internationally from the start, the merchant of record is often the simpler path. We lay out both at your price point before you choose.
Can you make the product ready for enterprise buyers?+
Yes. Enterprise buyers ask for the same things every time: single sign-on, directory provisioning, roles they can define, an audit log they can export, and admin screens their IT team can use. We design those into the data model early, so saying yes to the next large customer is a configuration change rather than a quarter of rework.
What have you built that carries over to SaaS?+
Multi-tenancy, per-organisation access and admin tooling run through most of what we build. FM360 is a multi-tenant platform with all three: organisations, apps and access managed per customer, usage analytics and login alerts. Subscriptions and billing logic we build inside the product, tested like any other code rather than left to a dashboard.