Northbank Payments processes cross-border settlements for banks and payment providers across Europe. Their existing platform ran on nightly batch cycles, a model that had worked for years but was starting to actively cost them new business.
The Challenge
Batch settlement meant every transaction sat in a queue until the next processing window, sometimes hours away. That was tolerable for legacy corridors, but it disqualified Northbank from newer, faster-moving markets where competitors were already settling in near real time. Engineering leadership knew the batch architecture itself, not any single bottleneck within it, was the actual ceiling.
The Approach
We proposed a streaming ledger built on an event-driven architecture, replacing the batch pipeline with idempotent APIs that could safely process the same transaction more than once without double-settling funds, a hard requirement in financial infrastructure. The migration ran in parallel with the existing system for several weeks, mirroring live traffic to validate correctness before a single real transaction moved through the new path.
Cutover happened corridor by corridor rather than all at once, so a problem in one region never put the whole platform at risk. Full engineering ownership, documentation and infrastructure access transferred to Northbank’s internal team at handover.
The Results
The new architecture processes transactions roughly three times faster than the batch system it replaced, and operational cost dropped by over a third, largely from eliminating the infrastructure that existed solely to manage batch queuing and retries. Northbank has since used the platform to enter two new corridors that the old system could not have supported.
