We get asked to support a new jurisdiction more often than we can realistically say yes to immediately. So a question we get less often, but should probably get more: how do we actually decide what's next?
It rarely starts with the biggest market. The instinct is to prioritise large, obvious markets first. In practice, a smaller jurisdiction with three banks actively asking for it often gets built before a bigger one nobody has requested yet — demand signal beats market size.
A single request doesn't move anything. A pattern does. One client asking about a country is a data point. Three unrelated institutions asking about the same country within a few months is a trend — and usually the point where a jurisdiction moves from "on the radar" to "being scoped."
We estimate effort honestly, including the boring part. The complexity of a new module isn't just the tax rules themselves — it's how many existing rules from other jurisdictions it has to interact cleanly with. A country with straightforward domestic rules can still take longer than expected if it interacts badly with common cross-border structures.
Sometimes the honest answer is "not yet." Occasionally a jurisdiction is requested by exactly one bank, for exactly one client, with no realistic scaling case. Building it anyway would mean either overcharging that one client for a bespoke module, or quietly under-investing in the quality bar we hold everywhere else. Neither is a good trade.
Beta clients see it before everyone else does. Once a country module is built, it typically runs with one or two existing clients with real portfolios in that jurisdiction before it's opened up more broadly — not because we distrust our own testing, but because production data finds things test data doesn't.
The honest version: "which country is next" is less a roadmap decision and more a running conversation with the banks already asking us.
