How Qualifast Helped Build

the Reloyalty Fintech Platform

The partnership started in 2019 through the local developer and startup community in Sofia.

At the time, Qualifast was co-organizing Google Developer Group Sofia events. After one of these events, the team was introduced to the founder of Reloyalty, who was searching for someone to help build the Android application.

After a few workshops, Qualifast took over the Android development task and quickly built trust with the founder.

Less than two months later, Reloyalty transferred the full technology scope to Qualifast:

This became the beginning of a long-term partnership that has continued for more than seven years.

The Reloyalty founder became one of the strongest ambassadors of Qualifast's startup engineering capabilities.

The first version of Reloyalty relied on Starling Bank APIs for transaction integration and Paybase wallet infrastructure to support cashback rewards.

During development, both infrastructure choices became major blockers.

Starling Bank did not approve Reloyalty for production operations, while Paybase's contractual conditions did not align with Reloyalty's financial model.

Qualifast helped migrate the platform to more suitable providers:

These migrations required substantial backend architecture changes while preserving the product direction and preparing the system for production launch.

For a fintech startup, this was not only a technical challenge but also a business-critical architecture decision.

One of Reloyalty's major selling points was the data insight available to merchants onboarded on the platform.

Qualifast created a web application that visualized customer behavior in a human-friendly way.

The merchant dashboard helped businesses:

The dashboard transformed complex financial transaction data into practical insights that non-technical merchant teams could understand and use.

This turned the platform from a simple rewards product into a SaaS-style merchant intelligence tool.

When Qualifast entered the project, Reloyalty had two in-house engineers working on the platform.

They were promising engineers, but after years of working without proper orchestration and guidance, they were heavily burned out.

When they recognized that Qualifast could take over their responsibilities, both engineers eventually resigned.

During this transition, Qualifast helped Reloyalty by:

For several months, Qualifast was the only team working on the technology solution.

In autumn 2019, the founders introduced a potential CTO candidate. Qualifast participated in several meetings, validated that collaboration would work, helped onboard him, and continued working alongside him on the product.

Because of the payment infrastructure provider changes, preparing a release candidate took longer than usual.

The last step before launch was obtaining CREST certification, which verified the security of the solution Qualifast had helped create.

The production release included:

The certification process took additional time, but the platform passed the testing without major issues.

At the beginning of 2020, Reloyalty launched live — about a year and a half after Qualifast started working on it, following several years of unsuccessful attempts before Qualifast joined.

Brexit was already a menacing shadow for the business, but Reloyalty took the hardest hit just a few weeks after the first official launch: COVID-19.

The business targeted onsite retail businesses as revenue generators.

With merchants closed and customer transactions disappearing, the platform lost the activity it depended on almost overnight.

The crisis created several immediate problems:

No budget plan could realistically accommodate a world economy shock at that scale.

The startup had reached production, but the market conditions needed for growth disappeared almost immediately after launch.

The original founder of Reloyalty remained a firm believer in the product idea, even in the hardest circumstances.

Instead of closing the business, he started searching for ways to help Reloyalty survive through the crisis.

During this period, Qualifast made itself available for the technical consultancy he needed.

Qualifast supported the company by:

The founder took similar steps with other in-house employees to reduce operational pressure.

This phase demonstrated the difference between short-term outsourcing and a long-term startup partnership.

After a few months working together with mCards, Qualifast was given a chance to create a proof of concept for a long-standing payment infrastructure problem.

mCards processed many card transactions, but needed a stable way to map money flows to specific merchants.

This attribution problem was difficult because many venues had multiple payment terminals, shared infrastructure, or co-located brands.

Qualifast developed an AI-assisted prototype that helped:

In less than a week, Qualifast used AI-assisted processing to produce a result with satisfactory precision.

In the following weeks, the solution was augmented with heuristic and cache layers to make it more affordable without losing too much accuracy.

The prototype is still waiting to be embedded into the core mCards systems, a task that needs to be handled by the internal team because they have the required system access.

Reloyalty shows how startup product development rarely follows a straight line.

The project moved through stalled development, infrastructure migrations, security certification, COVID disruption, organizational restructuring, US market pivot, and AI-assisted fintech experimentation.

Throughout the journey, Qualifast helped Reloyalty:

For startups operating in uncertain markets, this type of long-term technical partnership can become critical not only for building software, but for surviving market changes and creating future opportunities.