Impact study
Rebuilding a payments back office the business actually owns
A payments processor replaced a third-party legacy system with a Coastal platform that onboards merchants, keeps the ledger, computes partner commissions and runs payouts.
- Client
- National payments processor
- Industry
- Financial Services & Payments
- Status
- In production
The challenge
Operations ran on an aging system controlled by an outside developer, with commissions, reserves and payouts reconciled in spreadsheets. Every month of growth meant more manual work, more risk, and less visibility into where the money was.
What we deployed
Layer by layer.
Ballast
Unified gateway transactions, chargebacks, CRM records and payout rails into a ledger-grade model of merchants, partners and money movement.
Current
Automated risk checks at the moment of payment, support ticket triage, and payout batch proposals that go to a person for approval.
Keel
Delivered admin, merchant and partner portals covering onboarding with e-signature, double-entry ledgers, commissions, support and daily management reporting.
Harbor
Containerized services in the client's own cloud account, with tokenized card data, monitoring and alerting.
Outcomes
What changed.
- Merchant applications, agreements and activation in one flow
- Partner commissions computed and paid without spreadsheets
- Payouts batched across two ACH rails with balance checks before every send
- A partner API that took a point-of-sale integration live
Start with one operation. Transform all of them.
Tell us where the friction is. We'll show you what an AI-native version of that operation looks like, built on your systems.