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 to 5 day ACH waits.
- Compliance ready: 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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