TrustShield Compliance is a RegTech startup serving 340+ financial institutions across Canada and the United States, providing automated compliance monitoring, audit workflow management, and regulatory reporting software for banks, credit unions, insurance companies, and investment firms. In 2024, TrustShield's engineering team faced a critical scaling problem: their compliance dashboard, originally built as a monolithic Ruby on Rails application in 2019, was taking 40-90 seconds to load for clients with complex regulatory requirements, their audit workflow automation pipelines were failing 22% of the time due to race conditions and data inconsistencies, and their infrastructure could not handle the data security requirements needed to achieve SOC 2 Type II certification — which 67% of their enterprise prospects required before signing.
"CoderDesign rebuilt our entire compliance platform in 9 months with zero downtime. They understood that in RegTech, security and auditability aren't optional features — they're the foundation of everything." — CTO, TrustShield Compliance
Our team was engaged to architect and build a next-generation compliance dashboard and automation platform that could handle enterprise-scale workloads, meet SOC 2 Type II requirements, and reduce audit preparation time for TrustShield's clients from weeks to hours. Over 9 months, we designed and deployed a microservices-based platform with encrypted data pipelines, real-time compliance monitoring, automated evidence collection, and a zero-trust security architecture that achieved SOC 2 certification on the first audit. The platform now processes 2.8 million compliance checks per day, automated 94% of previously manual audit workflows, and reduced dashboard load times from 40-90 seconds to under 1.2 seconds. This case study details exactly what we built, the security and auditability challenges unique to RegTech, and how our full-stack development, AI automation, and secure infrastructure capabilities helped TrustShield scale to enterprise financial institutions.
The Challenge: A Compliance Platform That Couldn't Scale
TrustShield's original platform was built for small credit unions and regional banks. It worked well when clients had 50-200 compliance policies to monitor and 5-10 audits per year. But as TrustShield moved upmarket to serve national banks and multi-state insurance companies, the technical debt became unsustainable.
The Dashboard Was Unusably Slow for Enterprise Clients
TrustShield's dashboard pulled compliance data from multiple sources: internal policy documents, third-party risk assessments, regulatory change feeds from Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis, employee training completion records, security scan results from Qualys and Tenable, and evidence artifacts stored in AWS S3. The Ruby on Rails monolith made a separate database query for each data point, with no caching layer and no query optimization. For a mid-sized bank with 4,200 policies under management, loading the dashboard required 847 separate SQL queries totaling 40-90 seconds. Enterprise prospects who logged into the demo environment during sales calls would close the browser tab before the dashboard finished loading.
Audit Workflows Were Breaking at Scale
TrustShield's automation pipelines were supposed to collect evidence artifacts automatically — screenshots of security configurations, exports of access logs, copies of training records, backups of policy documents — and organize them into audit-ready evidence packages. But the pipeline orchestration was built with background jobs in Sidekiq with no retry logic, no idempotency guarantees, and no distributed locking. When multiple pipelines ran concurrently (which happened whenever a client had overlapping audit deadlines), race conditions caused evidence collection failures. 22% of audit evidence packages had missing or duplicate files, forcing compliance teams to manually re-collect evidence.
Security Architecture Could Not Meet SOC 2 Requirements
To sell to enterprise financial institutions, TrustShield needed SOC 2 Type II certification. But their infrastructure had critical gaps: no encryption at rest for customer data in PostgreSQL, no field-level encryption for sensitive audit evidence, no comprehensive audit logging of who accessed what data when, no role-based access controls granular enough to enforce segregation of duties, and no infrastructure-as-code (everything was manually configured in AWS console with no change tracking). The security assessor who conducted the gap analysis identified 42 controls that would need remediation before SOC 2 certification was achievable.
What We Built: A Secure, Scalable Compliance Platform
We decomposed the monolithic Rails application into a microservices architecture with six core services: a dashboard API (Node.js/TypeScript), an evidence collection engine (Python with Celery for distributed task processing), a policy change detection service (Go for high-throughput rule evaluation), a regulatory intelligence aggregator (Python with ML models for classifying regulatory updates), an audit workflow orchestrator (Temporal.io for durable workflow execution), and a document vault (encrypted S3 with versioning and immutable audit logs). All services communicated through encrypted message queues (AWS SQS with server-side encryption) and shared data through a central PostgreSQL cluster with field-level encryption for sensitive data.
Dashboard Performance: From 90 Seconds to Under 1.2 Seconds
We redesigned the dashboard API using a GraphQL federation pattern that allowed the frontend to request exactly the data it needed in a single query. Behind the scenes, GraphQL resolvers pulled data from multiple microservices and combined the results. We implemented aggressive caching with Redis (95% cache hit rate for compliance policy metadata) and used database materialized views for complex aggregations that previously required hundreds of joins. The most impactful optimization was moving real-time compliance scoring calculations from query-time to update-time — whenever a policy changed or evidence was collected, we updated the compliance score asynchronously and cached the result, so the dashboard just read a pre-computed value.
For clients with massive policy libraries, we implemented progressive loading. The dashboard loaded the summary view (overall compliance posture, critical alerts, upcoming audit deadlines) in under 600ms, then loaded detailed policy-level data in the background as the user scrolled. This perceived performance improvement was as important as the actual performance gains — compliance officers could start working immediately instead of waiting for the entire dashboard to render.
Secure Automation Pipelines with Temporal.io
The original Sidekiq-based pipelines had no durability guarantees. If a worker crashed mid-task, the evidence collection job was lost and had to be manually restarted. We rebuilt the automation engine using Temporal.io, a durable workflow orchestration platform that guarantees workflows run to completion even if workers crash, networks partition, or databases go down.
Each audit workflow was modeled as a Temporal workflow with dozens of activities (collect access logs, screenshot firewall rules, export training records, generate compliance report, upload to evidence vault). Temporal tracked the state of every workflow execution, automatically retried failed activities with exponential backoff, and provided a real-time UI showing exactly which step each audit was on. When TrustShield's compliance teams opened a ticket saying "Audit X is stuck," we could show them the exact activity that was waiting (usually a third-party API that was rate-limiting or a document that needed manual review) instead of debugging a black box.
We implemented idempotency for every automation activity. If an activity was retried due to a transient failure, it would check if the work had already been done and skip duplicate operations. This eliminated the duplicate file problem that plagued the old system.
Zero-Trust Security and Encryption at Every Layer
Financial compliance data is among the most sensitive information a company handles. A single data breach exposing audit findings, third-party risk assessments, or regulatory violation evidence could destroy a financial institution's reputation and trigger regulatory investigations. We designed the platform with a zero-trust security model where no service, no user, and no network location was trusted by default.
Encryption at Rest and In Transit
Every database (PostgreSQL, Redis, Elasticsearch) used encryption at rest with AWS KMS-managed keys rotated every 90 days. For compliance evidence documents in S3, we implemented client-side encryption where documents were encrypted by the application before upload using customer-managed encryption keys stored in AWS Secrets Manager. This meant that even AWS administrators with access to the S3 bucket could not read the contents without TrustShield's encryption keys.
All inter-service communication used mutual TLS (mTLS) where both client and server presented certificates to authenticate each other. API requests from the dashboard frontend included JSON Web Tokens (JWT) with short 15-minute expiration times, and refresh tokens were single-use and invalidated after refresh to prevent token replay attacks.
Field-Level Encryption for Sensitive Data
Some compliance data is more sensitive than others. Security scan results showing unpatched vulnerabilities, third-party risk assessments revealing vendor security gaps, and regulatory violation reports are especially sensitive. We implemented field-level encryption for these data types using deterministic encryption (AES-256-SIV) that allowed encrypted data to be indexed and searched while remaining encrypted in the database. Decryption only happened in the application layer, and only for users with explicit permission to view that data type.
Comprehensive Audit Logging
Every data access, every API call, every configuration change, and every user action was logged to an immutable audit trail stored in a separate AWS account that TrustShield's operations team could not access or modify. The audit logs included: who accessed what data, when they accessed it, from what IP address, what actions they performed, what queries they ran against the database, and what the system state was before and after each change.
For SOC 2 compliance, the security assessor needed to verify that audit logs could not be tampered with. We implemented cryptographic signatures on audit log entries where each entry contained a hash of the previous entry, creating a blockchain-like tamper-evident log. If any entry was modified or deleted, the hash chain would break, immediately flagging the tampering.
Infrastructure as Code and Immutable Deployments
Every piece of infrastructure was defined as code using Terraform. The complete platform could be deployed to a new AWS region with a single terraform apply command. All infrastructure changes went through pull requests with required code review from security engineers. Terraform state was stored in encrypted S3 buckets with state locking via DynamoDB to prevent concurrent modifications.
We adopted immutable deployments where application updates never modified running servers. Instead, new servers with the updated code were spun up, health checked, added to the load balancer, and only after successful deployment were old servers terminated. This meant every deployment was a rollback candidate — if a bug was discovered, we could instantly roll back to the previous immutable server image.
For database migrations, we used a blue-green migration strategy where schema changes were deployed in backward-compatible phases. Phase one deployed code that could work with both old and new schemas. Phase two migrated the data. Phase three deployed code that only used the new schema. This zero-downtime migration process meant TrustShield never had to schedule maintenance windows that disrupted customer access.
AI-Powered Regulatory Intelligence
Financial institutions need to track hundreds of regulatory requirements across multiple jurisdictions. A mid-sized bank operating in 3 states needs to monitor FDIC regulations, state banking regulations, CFPB consumer protection rules, SEC disclosure requirements, BSA/AML anti-money laundering rules, OFAC sanctions lists, and dozens of other regulatory frameworks — each of which publishes updates multiple times per year.
TrustShield's original approach was to have compliance analysts manually read regulatory updates from Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis feeds and map them to affected policies. This took 40-60 hours per week and was a major bottleneck. We built an AI regulatory intelligence system that automated 80% of this work.
The system ingested regulatory update feeds, used NLP models to classify updates by regulatory domain (capital requirements, liquidity ratios, consumer protection, cybersecurity, etc.), extracted obligation statements ("banks must maintain a liquidity coverage ratio of at least 100%"), and used semantic similarity models to match obligations to TrustShield's policy library. When a regulatory update potentially affected one of a client's policies, the system created a notification with the relevant policy, the regulatory change, the effective date, and a suggested action (update policy, collect new evidence, schedule audit).
The AI system reduced false positives (regulatory updates that didn't actually require action) from 67% to 12%, and reduced the time from regulatory publication to client notification from 7-14 days to under 24 hours.
Results: SOC 2 Certified and Enterprise-Ready
The platform launched to TrustShield's existing customer base with zero downtime during the migration. The technical and business results exceeded every target.
- Dashboard load time reduced from 40-90 seconds to under 1.2 seconds (97% improvement)
- Audit pipeline failure rate reduced from 22% to 0.4%
- Evidence collection automated 94% of previously manual workflows
- Audit preparation time reduced from 3-4 weeks to under 48 hours for typical audits
- SOC 2 Type II certification achieved on the first audit with zero critical findings
- Platform now processes 2.8 million compliance checks per day across all clients
- Enterprise customer acquisition increased 340% in 12 months post-launch
- System uptime: 99.97% (exceeding the 99.9% SLA commitment)
- Zero data breaches or security incidents since launch
- Client renewal rate increased from 89% to 96%
- Support ticket volume decreased 62% due to improved reliability and usability
TrustShield has since expanded the platform to support HIPAA compliance monitoring for healthcare clients, GDPR compliance for EU subsidiaries of North American banks, and ISO 27001 certification workflows for technology companies.
How We Can Help Your Compliance or Enterprise Platform
Whether you are a RegTech startup, a financial services company building internal compliance systems, an enterprise SaaS platform that needs SOC 2 certification, or a mature platform struggling with technical debt and scaling challenges, the architectural patterns and security practices we implemented at TrustShield apply to organizations of every size.
Our capabilities include secure microservices architecture with zero-trust security, encrypted data pipelines, and SOC 2/ISO 27001-ready infrastructure. We build AI automation systems for regulatory intelligence, policy monitoring, and audit workflow orchestration. We specialize in zero-downtime migrations from monolithic architectures to scalable microservices. And we provide comprehensive infrastructure-as-code implementations with Terraform, immutable deployments, and disaster recovery planning.
If your platform is struggling with performance problems, failing security audits, pipeline reliability issues, or technical debt preventing you from scaling to enterprise customers, book a free consultation. We will review your architecture, your security posture, your compliance requirements, and give you an honest assessment of what it takes to build a secure, scalable platform that enterprise customers will trust.