Context
A fintech company's funding paths relied heavily on ACH transfers, which take multiple business days to settle. New users hit a wall during onboarding — they wanted to fund their account immediately and couldn't, so they abandoned. The team needed faster funding methods that could coexist with the existing ACH infrastructure.
Approach
I integrated two new payment rails: a debit-card-based instant deposit flow and an external cash deposit network. The work covered the full lifecycle — ACH file generation, reconciliation, chargebacks, 3DS authentication, fraud controls, partial-authorization handling.
The harder parts were the edge cases: instant authorization that succeeds but settles late, partial settlements, chargebacks that arrive months later, reconciliation gaps between the rail's view of the world and ours. I designed retry and reconciliation logic for each of those, with audit trails so any operator can answer 'where is this money right now?' for any transaction.
My role
DRI for the integration. Owned vendor evaluation, the architecture, the rollout, and the reconciliation system. Worked directly with the rails' integration engineers on edge cases that weren't in either of our specs.
Outcome
Faster funding paths cut onboarding abandonment for funding-related drop-offs. Chargeback and dispute infrastructure now aligns with regulatory expectations, and the reconciliation system prevents the kind of silent money loss that's hard to spot until quarter-close.