Payment & Settlement Platform
~30 min → ~2 min TAT
Payment processing, settlement and reconciliation workflows supporting multiple payment methods and financial transactions.
Problem
Payment flows have to stay correct under load and remain reconcilable afterwards. Slow turnaround delays customers, and any gap between what the platform believes happened and what actually settled becomes a manual investigation that grows with volume.
Solution
An event-driven payment path where processing is decoupled from the request cycle, transaction state is tracked explicitly at every step, and reconciliation runs continuously against settlement data rather than as an end-of-period scramble.
My Contribution
- Built and improved payment processing across multiple payment methods.
- Implemented settlement and reconciliation workflows.
- Reduced payment turnaround by reworking the processing path and removing bottlenecks.
- Optimised day-end processing through batching and query improvements.
- Added idempotent handling and retry semantics for transaction safety.
Key Features
- Support for multiple payment methods and transaction types
- Asynchronous, queue-backed processing pipeline
- Automated settlement workflows
- Continuous reconciliation with exception surfacing
- Idempotent operations with safe retries
- Explicit transaction state tracking and reporting
Architecture
Initiation—Payment request accepted and validated.
Event-driven path from payment initiation to reconciliation.
Technologies
- Python
- Django
- PostgreSQL
- Redis
- Celery
- AWS
Impact
- Payment turnaround improved from ~30 minutes to ~2 minutes for the majority of payments
- Day-end processing reduced from ~2 hours to ~10 minutes
- Lower manual effort in reconciliation and exception handling
Want to talk through the details?
Happy to go deeper on any of the engineering decisions here.