WBSO for FinTech: Does Your Project Qualify in 2026?
Manna Team
Financial services companies build some of the most technically demanding software in the Netherlands — from fraud detection that must react in milliseconds to payment infrastructure that has to stay consistent under heavy load. Much of this work qualifies for the WBSO, but FinTech teams often assume that "we just process transactions" doesn't count as R&D. Ready to apply? Start with the complete guide to applying for WBSO.
When does FinTech qualify?
The WBSO reimburses the development of technically new software or systems where genuine technical uncertainty exists — not the outcome of a business decision, but a real open question about whether and how something can be built. In FinTech, that uncertainty usually sits in the accuracy, latency or consistency guarantees that existing tools can't give you out of the box.
Usually qualifies:
- A new real-time fraud- or anomaly-detection model where the false-positive/false-negative trade-off is technically uncertain
- A novel payment-settlement or orchestration architecture solving a genuine scaling or consistency problem across systems
- A new risk-scoring approach with uncertain predictive accuracy
- Technical R&D into cryptographic or distributed-ledger settlement mechanisms
Usually does not qualify:
- Integrating an existing payment gateway or KYC vendor without your own technical development
- Applying an off-the-shelf fraud-scoring API as-is
- Routine dashboard or reporting development
- Standard regulatory compliance paperwork, such as document checklists for payment or anti-money-laundering requirements
Why "just processing data" often still qualifies
FinTech teams sometimes assume their work is too operational to count. But technical uncertainty doesn't require a lab experiment — it requires an open technical question that you have to solve yourself, not one that an existing tool already answers. Fraud detection is a good example: it isn't about running a query against a rules table, it's about hitting a required accuracy and latency target while fraud patterns keep shifting and transaction volumes spike unpredictably. The moment you're developing your own approach to stay accurate and fast under adversarial, evolving conditions — rather than configuring an existing tool — you're likely doing qualifying R&D. The same logic applies to settlement systems: guaranteeing consistency and correctness at scale, or across ledgers, under concurrent load is a technical development problem, even though the end result "just" moves numbers between accounts.
How do you describe a FinTech project?
Frame your project around RVO's four questions, in plain technical language: what are you building (for example, a new anomaly-detection model or a settlement-orchestration layer), why is it technically new for your company (which existing approach falls short, and why), which technical problems do you expect (such as maintaining detection accuracy as fraud patterns evolve, or consistency under concurrent settlement), and how do you plan to solve them (your technical approach, not the business goal). Avoid describing the project in terms of compliance outcomes or product features — RVO assesses the technical development challenge, not the financial result. Technical novelty and technical uncertainty together define qualifying R&D work. If your development also involves building and testing a working prototype under realistic conditions — a live version of your fraud model or settlement flow — that maps closely to experimental development.
Get started
Manna is built to recognise qualifying R&D in FinTech projects — from fraud models to settlement infrastructure — and drafts the application for you, so you submit a strong WBSO application in about 90 minutes.
This article is informational. See RVO.nl for the current conditions.
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