Automated Payment Settlement & Escrow Engine
Vestra Multi-Party Payment Orchestration
A payment orchestration layer that automates ledgering and split payouts at the point of transaction—built for correctness, auditability, and AML-aware workflows.
The Challenge
A PropTech marketplace struggled with complex flow-of-funds. Rent payments needed to be split between Property Owners (92%), Maintenance Reserves (5%), and Platform Fees (3%) instantly. Manual reconciliation caused accounting errors, delayed disbursements, and potential AML compliance gaps.
The hard part is correctness under failure: webhooks arrive out of order, retries happen, and partial outages are inevitable. Without ledger-backed accounting and idempotent execution, duplicate charges, split errors, and reconciliation drift become unavoidable—and those mistakes are expensive when money moves across multiple stakeholders.
Quick Stats
- Payments: Stripe Connect (Custom/Express)
- Verification: Plaid (KYC/KYB signals)
- Correctness: Double-entry ledger + idempotency
- Impact: Zero manual reconciliation; automated fee splits
The Solution
We built a custom payment orchestration layer that automates ledgering and distribution of funds at the point of transaction—ensuring sub-account accuracy and instant transparency.
The system treats payments as stateful financial events: every charge produces ledger entries, split rules are deterministic, and payouts occur only when balances reconcile. Month-end becomes a predictable audit step rather than a manual fire drill.
Technical Approach
- Double-entry ledgering: Database-level ledger tracks virtual balances before triggering bank movements.
- Idempotency protection: Every request is tagged with a unique key to prevent duplicate charges or split errors during timeouts.
Technical Details
Architecture
Next.js → NestJS → Stripe Connect (Custom/Express)
Integrations
Plaid API for instant ACH verification (KYC/KYB) + Stripe for cards/wallets.
Security
PCI-DSS Level 1 compliant; AES-256 bank-level encryption; automated SAR flagging; multi-sig approvals for large withdrawals.
AI Features
Anomaly detection monitors transaction velocity and pauses suspected account takeover (ATO) attempts.
Engineering Deep Dive
Ledger-first correctness
- Every transaction produces balanced entries before settlement
- Split logic is deterministic and versioned (owners/fees/reserves)
- Reconciliation is a query, not a manual month-end process
- Dispute/chargeback workflows maintain an auditable trail
Reliability patterns (payments)
- Idempotency keys across charge/split/payout operations
- Retry policies with backoff and dead-letter handling for failures
- Webhook verification + replay protection for payment events
- State machines for payout lifecycle (pending → cleared → paid)
Security & compliance
- PCI tokenization and least-privilege access to payment objects
- Multi-sig approvals and rate-limited admin actions
- Immutable audit logs for access, payouts, and configuration changes
- Fraud monitoring hooks with hold/review queues
Operational readiness
- Alerts on payout failures, duplicate events, and anomaly patterns
- Runbooks for chargebacks, reversals, and reconciliation audits
- Backfills and replay tooling for webhook-driven systems
- Environment separation for testing money movement safely
Results & Impact
- Zero manual reconciliation: accounting automated via real-time webhooks.
- Instant liquidity: owners receive funds via instant payouts rather than 3–5 day ACH waits.
- 100% compliance: automated tax reporting and 1099-K generation.
Ready to build something similar?
We’ll design your ledger + settlement flows for correctness, auditability, and reliability under real payment failures.
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