Wallet Primacy: Cards, Balance, and BNPL

A leading peer-to-peer payments platform engaged Taller to build the custodial ledger that underpinned its configurable wallet products, including the US buy-now-pay-later launch. The engagement was part of a multi-year fintech partnership spanning the consumer and platform sides of the global payments company.

The payments company’s wallet-monetization strategy came down to a simple idea: instead of letting peer-payment balances sweep out to bank accounts, keep them in the wallet where they could be spent at merchants. Doing that required a custodial system of record (the authoritative ledger that tracks whose money is whose) that the company could run itself: adjustable in real time and free of the licensing fees and constraints of an outside vendor. Without that in-house ledger, the products built around the wallet (buy-now-pay-later, the credit platform, and the wallet cards) couldn’t launch at the pace the business needed.

Taller built the customized system of record on Apache Fineract, an open-source core-banking engine, running in Docker with Java for the application logic, PostgreSQL for storage, ActiveMQ for messaging, and TestNG for validation. This ledger was the foundation that paved the way for the company’s US buy-now-pay-later launch, a Taller-delivered system that the company then ran independently.