Settlement + Reconciliation Engine: 99.95% Accuracy at $1B+ GTV
A multi-rail settlement and reconciliation engine, canonical double-entry ledger, three-way auto-reconciliation, exception management and corridor-aware payout windows. Closed the gap between treasury, finance and product at $1B+ GTV.
What this is, in one paragraph.
Replaced spreadsheet reconciliation across five rails with a canonical ledger, three-way auto-recon and an exception taxonomy that fed product. Made unit economics observable per rail, per corridor, per merchant.
“A multi-rail settlement and reconciliation engine, canonical double-entry ledger, three-way auto-reconciliation, exception management and corridor-aware payout windows. Closed the gap between treasury, finance and product at $1B+ GTV.”
Rail events, internal ledger and bank statements are matched continuously. Exceptions are typed and routed; the defect stream feeds product backlog so the same break never recurs.
The job to be done.
Multi-rail flows across cards, wallets, IBFT, DCB and cross-border corridors created reconciliation breakage that finance and treasury were absorbing manually, slowing payouts and obscuring real margin.
What we shipped.
- Canonical transaction ledger across all rails
- Automated three-way reconciliation: gateway, bank/partner, internal ledger
- Settlement scheduler with corridor-aware payout windows
- Exception workflows with root-cause tagging fed back to product
How it's put together.
- Double-entry ledger as the source of truth; rails publish events that post entries
- Recon as a stream join across three sources with a tagged exception store
- Settlement scheduler reads available balance per merchant per currency per corridor
How it actually runs.
- Finance signs off on the ledger model and exception taxonomy
- Every exception type has a product owner and a recovery SLA
Where I sat in the work.
Product owner working alongside finance, treasury and engineering. Defined the ledger model, exception taxonomy and settlement SLAs.
What moved.
- 99.95% reconciliation accuracy at $1B+ GTV scale
- Eliminated manual journal entries for core flows
- Made unit economics observable per rail, per corridor, per merchant
What we chose against.
- Held back a faster payout window until recon confidence was demonstrable
- Built our own exception store rather than buying a recon tool, better feedback loop, more ownership
What I'd take into the next build.
- Settlement and reconciliation are not back-office problems, they decide trust with merchants and partners.
- If finance is your reconciliation system, you don't have one.
Relevance to networks, PSPs and cross-border platforms.
Acceptance, scheme settlement and treasury teams at Visa/Mastercard/Stripe/Adyen are essentially recon products. This is exactly that work, in production.
Discussing payment infrastructure / product leadership roles?
Reference-available. Download the résumé or get in touch.
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