Fintechly
A custom WordPress theme powering a fintech news, rankings, and intelligence publication.
Fintechly is a fintech news and intelligence publication based in London and Dubai, covering banking, payments, infrastructure, capital markets, and policy for the people who build, fund, and regulate the industry. Beyond daily reporting and interviews, it runs its own recognition products, The Fintechly 47, The Fintechly 101, a monthly Index, and annual awards, plus a directory of companies and people and a weekly newsletter called The Ledger.
I was engaged to build the platform that carries all of this: a custom WordPress theme developed from scratch, with the taxonomy structure for five editorial pillars and their subcategories, custom post types for company and people profiles, templates for the rankings and directory surfaces, and the front-end details, the funding-deal ticker, the typography system, the performance setup, that make it read like a financial publication rather than a blog.
Editorial taxonomy & templates
Coverage is organized into five pillars, Banking & Neobanks, Payments, Infrastructure, Capital & Deals, and Policy & Regulation, each with its own subcategories like Cross-Border, Identity & KYC, or Open Banking. I mapped this directly onto WordPress taxonomies and built the templates around the hierarchy: pillar landing pages, subcategory archives, and article templates that adjust for formats like news and interviews. The two-level navigation menus, footer sitemap, and homepage sections all read from the same taxonomy, so editors file a story once and it surfaces everywhere it should without manual placement.
Company & people directory
Beyond articles, Fintechly maintains a directory of fintech companies and the people behind them. I modeled these as separate custom post types with their own URL spaces (/company/ and /profile/), profile templates, and sector groupings, so a company page can accumulate structured facts independently of the news feed. The directory front end offers browsing by sector and a search field that spans people, companies, and sectors, and it connects to the membership side of the site through a claim-your-profile flow.
Rankings, Index & Awards
The publication runs its own recognition products, The Fintechly 47, The Fintechly 101, a monthly Fintechly Index, and annual awards, each with a dedicated template. The Index page renders ranked rows with a "what changed this month" section and its own name-or-company search, and links to the same company profiles as the directory, so a ranked entry and a directory listing are one record, not two. A published methodology page sits alongside the rankings, which shaped the build: this content had to look authoritative and stay easy for editors to update on a cycle.
Deal ticker & data accents
The homepage carries a scrolling ticker of recent funding rounds, company, round type, amount, valuation, set in JetBrains Mono, and the footer runs a UTC clock beside the London and Dubai locations. These are small touches, but they set the register of the site: a financial publication rather than a generic blog. The ticker markup is rendered by the theme from published content and animated with a lightweight script, so it stays crawlable and doesn't depend on an external widget.
Typography & performance
The design leans on three typefaces, Instrument Serif for headlines, Inter Tight for interface text, JetBrains Mono for data, wired into the theme as CSS variables so every template pulls from the same tokens. Styles are authored with Tailwind and shipped as a single compiled stylesheet, and the front end loads one JavaScript bundle for the ticker, menus, and search. Full-page caching via WP Rocket sits on top, so most requests are served as static HTML, a sensible setup for a news site where pages change on publish, not per visitor.
The theme is hand-built rather than assembled on a page builder. Post types for companies and people, and the taxonomy for the five editorial pillars, are registered in PHP; the WordPress template hierarchy then does the heavy lifting, pillar landings, subcategory archives, single-article layouts, profile pages, and standalone surfaces like the Index and The Ledger each map to their own template, sharing partials for article cards, headers, and the ticker. Editors work in the standard WordPress admin; nothing on the front end requires them to touch layout.
On the front end I kept the footprint deliberately small: Tailwind compiled to a single stylesheet at build time with the design tokens exposed as CSS variables, one JavaScript file for the interactive pieces, and everything else rendered server-side by PHP. WP Rocket handles full-page caching on top of that, which suits an editorial site well, pages are effectively static between publishes, so the server does the rendering work once per update rather than once per visitor.
What exists now is a self-contained publishing platform: one WordPress install serving daily fintech coverage across five verticals, a company and people directory, monthly rankings, events, and newsletter pages, all under a single design system, and all publishable by the editorial team without a developer in the loop.