Challenge
Aslan is a UK fintech offering earned wage access (EWA): employees draw pay they've already earned before payday, through a mobile app with a digital wallet and payment card.
Building it meant operating inside a heavily regulated financial environment from day one. The app had to handle sensitive financial data under PCI compliance, stay aligned with evolving financial regulations and app store policies, and integrate with employer payroll systems without ever putting payroll integrity at risk. Several third-party services — payment processing, wallet infrastructure, in-app support — had to be wired together with strict security guarantees, high availability, and resilience, because failures in a product that touches people's wages are not acceptable.
There was also an orchestration challenge beyond the code. Aslan needed a full product team, not just mobile developers: project management, QA, backend, and mobile had to come together from multiple companies and operate as one team, with Pink Room taking the product from concept to market.
Finally, the product had to ship into both app stores — with virtual cards working in Apple Pay and Google Pay — and keep shipping as compliance requirements changed, without disrupting the people who depend on it to access their pay.
Aslan is a UK fintech offering earned wage access (EWA): employees draw pay they've already earned before payday, through a mobile app with a digital wallet and payment card.
Building it meant operating inside a heavily regulated financial environment from day one. The app had to handle sensitive financial data under PCI compliance, stay aligned with evolving financial regulations and app store policies, and integrate with employer payroll systems without ever putting payroll integrity at risk. Several third-party services — payment processing, wallet infrastructure, in-app support — had to be wired together with strict security guarantees, high availability, and resilience, because failures in a product that touches people's wages are not acceptable.
There was also an orchestration challenge beyond the code. Aslan needed a full product team, not just mobile developers: project management, QA, backend, and mobile had to come together from multiple companies and operate as one team, with Pink Room taking the product from concept to market.
Finally, the product had to ship into both app stores — with virtual cards working in Apple Pay and Google Pay — and keep shipping as compliance requirements changed, without disrupting the people who depend on it to access their pay.
Solution
Pink Room led the engagement end to end: we assembled and ran a cross-company product team, delivering the mobile app, project management, and QA ourselves while orchestrating backend and additional engineering partners around us.
On mobile, we built the app in React Native (with React Query, Zustand, and Zod) — an EWA app with secure digital wallets, real-time earned-balance visibility, transaction history, and a virtual payment card wired into Apple Pay and Google Pay. The backend ran on Java and AWS (Lambda, Cognito, S3) with Firebase alongside.
The regulated environment shaped the engineering throughout. We integrated Tribe Payments for PCI-compliant payment processing and Mea Wallet for secure wallets and balance management, treating each integration as a security boundary with strict guarantees on availability and data handling. Payroll integration was built payroll-safe: employees access earned wages without the employer's payroll systems ever being put at risk.
Because financial regulation and app store policy both evolve, we built a dynamic force-update mechanism — the app can push regulatory and platform-compliance changes to all users without disrupting them, keeping the product continuously compliant after launch.
QA was set up as a first-class discipline from the start: standards, metrics, and end-to-end testing were established early and enforced throughout, which is what a product handling people's wages requires.
Pink Room led the engagement end to end: we assembled and ran a cross-company product team, delivering the mobile app, project management, and QA ourselves while orchestrating backend and additional engineering partners around us.
On mobile, we built the app in React Native (with React Query, Zustand, and Zod) — an EWA app with secure digital wallets, real-time earned-balance visibility, transaction history, and a virtual payment card wired into Apple Pay and Google Pay. The backend ran on Java and AWS (Lambda, Cognito, S3) with Firebase alongside.
The regulated environment shaped the engineering throughout. We integrated Tribe Payments for PCI-compliant payment processing and Mea Wallet for secure wallets and balance management, treating each integration as a security boundary with strict guarantees on availability and data handling. Payroll integration was built payroll-safe: employees access earned wages without the employer's payroll systems ever being put at risk.
Because financial regulation and app store policy both evolve, we built a dynamic force-update mechanism — the app can push regulatory and platform-compliance changes to all users without disrupting them, keeping the product continuously compliant after launch.
QA was set up as a first-class discipline from the start: standards, metrics, and end-to-end testing were established early and enforced throughout, which is what a product handling people's wages requires.
Results
Aslan went from concept to a live product on both app stores — a compliant EWA platform with virtual cards working in Apple Pay and Google Pay, used by employees to access their earned wages in real time.
The market validated the product: in January 2025, Aslan raised a €4.7M seed round to expand the platform (publicly announced; covered by EU-Startups). The engagement also validated the delivery model — a boutique mobile studio orchestrating a multi-company product team and carrying a regulated fintech product all the way to market, not just supplying developers.
The compliance-first architecture has held up in production: the dynamic force-update mechanism lets Aslan respond to regulatory and app store policy changes without disrupting users, and the payroll-safe integration model means employers can offer the benefit without risk to their payroll operations.
The relationship itself is its own result: Pink Room remained Aslan's mobile and delivery partner from 2023 onward, across multiple team rotations — the kind of durable engagement that only happens when a product team trusts the work.
Aslan went from concept to a live product on both app stores — a compliant EWA platform with virtual cards working in Apple Pay and Google Pay, used by employees to access their earned wages in real time.
The market validated the product: in January 2025, Aslan raised a €4.7M seed round to expand the platform (publicly announced; covered by EU-Startups). The engagement also validated the delivery model — a boutique mobile studio orchestrating a multi-company product team and carrying a regulated fintech product all the way to market, not just supplying developers.
The compliance-first architecture has held up in production: the dynamic force-update mechanism lets Aslan respond to regulatory and app store policy changes without disrupting users, and the payroll-safe integration model means employers can offer the benefit without risk to their payroll operations.
The relationship itself is its own result: Pink Room remained Aslan's mobile and delivery partner from 2023 onward, across multiple team rotations — the kind of durable engagement that only happens when a product team trusts the work.
