Secure Smart Contract Engineering and Software Development Practices for Resilient FinTech Blockchain Systems

Abstract

FinTechs have been moving to blockchain to automate financial processes, enhance auditability, and decrease the use of manual intermediaries. Smart contracts make this automation possible, by encoding business rules into executable code, but their design flaws, lax secure coding discipline and limited organizational readiness can turn automation into systemic risk. The paper will explore the role of smart contract security engineering, software development maturity in ensuring secure and scalable blockchain implementation in FinTech. The study combines the principles of Secure Software Development Life Cycle (SSDLC) with the principles of Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) perspective and empirically tests the offered model with the help of quantitative, cross-sectional design. Data are gathered among professionals involved in FinTech and software development practices in Pakistan and evaluated with the help of Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). The findings indicate that maturity of software development has the highest level of association with blockchain adoption and implementation success ( 0.75), followed by technology department capability ( 0.40) and security engineering and scalability readiness reinforce overall architectural maturity and mitigate exposure to cyber risk. Model analysis shows that it was adequately fitting (SRMR = 0.09) with moderate explanatory power on the outcome construct (R 2 = 0.66). The results have shown that resilient FinTech blockchain systems rely not only on the underlying blockchain platform, but also on disciplined engineering processes and institutional capability. Future research can build on the framework by including behavioral and governance variables and testing the model in various regions to enhance generalizability.