FATCA forms are among the most frustrating parts of the investment process. With up to 30 sections and 8 pages in small font to navigate, these tax compliance documents create significant friction for investors and operations teams alike.
With the explosive growth in Roundtable’s fund activity, FATCA forms became a critical bottleneck. Our Operations Team found themselves in endless back-and-forth email loops with investors, diverting attention from more strategic initiatives and slowing down fund deployment timelines.
Rather than wait for engineering resources, our Product Team took matters into their own hands. Using AI coding tools, the team has built and shipped a working FATCA generator in just days – transforming a painful manual process into a streamlined digital experience.
We spoke with Sofia about how the team approached this challenge, the tools they used, and what they learned about rapid prototyping with AI.
Key takeaways:
- Using Replit, the Product Team developed a functional FATCA form generator that simplifies the form-filling experience for investors through an intuitive and efficient web-based interface.
- The tool allows investors to complete FATCA forms often in just a few minutes on their phone while also reducing operational back-and-forth, saving time for the Fund Operations Team.
- This project demonstrated how AI coding tools can enable rapid experimentation without consuming engineering resources, creating a new model for testing product ideas at Roundtable.
- The approach serves as both an operational solution and a validation filter – allowing the team to test user adoption before investing full development resources.
Roundtable: Could you start by explaining why FATCA forms became such a pain point?
Some of the FATCA forms are lengthy, densely formatted, and broken into complex sections that are hard to navigate. As a result, investors often shared their frustration with our Funds Team, finding the process unintuitive and cumbersome. We, the Product Team, saw in it a great opportunity to experiment with new approaches for developing an MVP.
Roundtable: How did you approach solving this problem?
Sofia: We wanted to test whether this was really going to solve the problem for investors, and whether it would actually be used. We decided not to spend Tech Team resources and instead leverage low-code and no-code platforms to streamline the form-filling process.
The key challenge wasn't just creating a nice digital interface – we needed to ensure that each PDF field was properly mapped. When users fill something out on the front-end, they need to get a form that's correctly filled out for them to use.
We started testing different vibe coding platforms like Lovable, V0, and Replit to see what worked. Lovable and V0 didn't really understand the mapping task initially – this was maybe two months ago, so perhaps it's different now. But they couldn't grasp that something needed to be mapped between the interface and the PDF output.
Roundtable: Why did you choose Replit in the end?
Sofia: Replit somewhat understood the mapping task we wanted to accomplish, but there was still a problem: the internal fields for each PDF form didn't have explicit names. So we had to extract the internal field names from each PDF field and manually map them so Replit Agent could understand how to handle the PDF forms.
It took some time and effort. We worked with three different FATCA forms – two forms only have one page to fill, so we didn't expect investors would really use the platform for those. But there's another form with 30 sections to navigate, so we really focused on mapping that complex PDF form and simplifying the process by dynamically showing the relevant sections.
As it was our first time integrating such a tool into the MVP development process, the Replit’s rollback functionality was extremely useful. In case the AI Agent implemented a prompt in the way we didn’t intend to, we could simply go a step back, deleting the changes and trying to make our prompt more precise rather than going to the code directly and reversing the modifications manually (or even worse, building on this unintentional change further).
Roundtable: What does the final solution look like?
Sofia: What we ended up with is a working MVP – maybe not the most beautiful, but functional. Now investors can choose their legal entity status, and they'll only be shown the particular sections of the FATCA form relevant to them, based on the FATCA Form instructions. They're not lost in all 30 sections that might be confusing for them.
It works well – we've tested it with most use cases. Investors can complete the form in about 2-3 minutes, and they can even do it on their phone. What they get is a pre-filled PDF that they couldn't otherwise create on mobile.
Roundtable: What kind of time savings are you seeing?
Sofia: For investors, if you do it with the traditional FATCA form, it takes much longer because you have to go through the lengthy document. With our tool, it takes 2-3 minutes and you can do it from your phone. Of course, investors remain responsible for ensuring the form is completed accurately and in full. But the tool helps them fill it out faster.
For our Fund Operations Team, the tool also reduces the volume of back-and-forth emails, resulting in significant time savings and improved operational efficiency.
Roundtable: What broader lessons did you learn about using AI coding tools?
Sofia: This was one of the first experiments for Roundtable where we integrated AI at a level that allowed us to push out a usable MVP without spending technical resources. I think it's a game-changer for the product side, where you can have ideas you want to test, but you don't have the technical resources to spend on them.
Here, you can build them in 2-3 days, share them with your customers, gather feedback, and see if you want to prioritize this feature or not. It paves the way for all future testing we might do on the product side.
Roundtable: If you had to do this again, what would you do differently?
Sofia: My main learning is about prompting technique. Because AI talks to you in human language, you unconsciously sometimes forget that it's a machine that would actually execute your tasks. When you are in the flow, you sometimes stop giving super precise instructions, and that messes up your prompt.
For instance, if you just say something like "I want a gray separator here," the machine doesn't understand that. So it messes up the entire UI you're trying to build.
My advice for anyone working with vibe coding agents is to prompt another LLM-based tool, such as ChatGPT, first. Go to your preferred tool and say you're working with Replit and explain what you’re trying to achieve. Explain what you want in human language, then ask it to prepare an extensive prompt so the Replit agent really understands what you want.
That reframes your vague human language into something super neat that the machine can understand. It really speeds up your process and eliminates the risk of going in “rollback” circles.
Roundtable: How does this fit into Roundtable's broader product strategy?
Sofia: Beyond the operational gains, this approach allows us to not lose tech team resources. We view the received outcome, the FATCA Generator, as an MVP, helping us decide whether to move forward with full development.
There's a very good chance that people might say the whole FATCA form thing doesn't give them much advantage – and that's OK, because we spent maybe a week on the product side, but we didn't spend a second of the tech team's time on this experiment.
So it's not only a precursor for future products we might build, it's also a very well-used filter to see if we go further or not.
Roundtable: What's your take on developers and AI coding tools?
Sofia: I don't think developers won't be needed at some point. Even though we managed to build an MVP, I don't think you can build a well-crafted product with good design without any technical experience. Even if you have all these beautiful AI tools that can give you code, you still need technical experience to evaluate and package it properly.
The vibe coding experience has certainly a very peculiar learning curve – when you first start, you don't understand what's happening, or you think it's all-powerful and can do everything. The more you work with it, the more you discover the limitations and constraints, and you learn to optimize and work within those boundaries.
Roundtable: Any final thoughts on this approach?
Sofia: Personally, I’m very excited about the possibilities the tools like Replit are opening to the Product Team. We've already identified more opportunities, where we will leverage AI tools for MVP development.
The key is that this isn't just about operational efficiency – it's about creating a new way to validate product ideas quickly. We can now test concepts in days rather than months, and that's incredibly valuable for a fast-growing company like Roundtable.
Try our FATCA generator at fatca.roundtable.eu
