How We Developed a High-Scale SMB Funding Platform for an Innovative Lender

Project challenge

1. Intricate Calculation Functionality:
   Develop functionality that calculates and distributes commissions while taking into account a diverse array of factors.
2. Complex User Interface:
   Implement a great number of details, while keeping the UI intuitive and user-friendly.
3. Provide Scalability and the Ability to Sustain High-Loads:
   Allow each of the thousands of merchants to concurrently generate hundreds of transactions per day.
4. Numerous and Diverse Compliance Requirements:
   Ensure the solution’s full PCI DSS and GDPR compliance, while also implementing the required Know Your Customer (KYC)/Know Your Business (KYB) procedures.

Technical requirements for embedding SMB lending in a platform

We build SMB lending solutions on scalable and API-first infrastructure rather than standalone applications. To support seamless user experiences and real-time funding, platforms need to address several key technical challenges:

End-to-End Lending Workflow Orchestration: Embedded lending solutions require full automation of the borrower journey: from onboarding and verification to underwriting, decisioning, and disbursement. This includes:

• Digital onboarding flows with KYC/KYB verification
• Automated credit decisioning based on real-time financial and behavioral data ingestion
• Configurable loan and repayment models, supporting multiple financing types (e.g., term loans, merchant cash advances, BNPL).

Banking and Financial Ecosystem Integration: A critical requirement is the ability to integrate with a wide range of financial partners. These integrations must be standardized and abstracted to ensure flexibility across regions and partners.

• Open banking providers for account access
• Payment gateways and card issuing systems
• Banking institutions for fund storage and disbursement
• Integration with international payment rails and money transfer providers to support cross-border funding and settlements.

Infrastructure for Real-Time and Cross-Border Payments: In practice, it typically requires cloud-native, event-driven architecture (e.g., Kafka-based streaming), horizontally scalable microservices, and low-latency data processing layers, forming the foundation of scalable digital banking ecosystems. To enable instant access to capital, platforms must support:

• Real-time fund disbursement to merchant accounts
• International money transfers with multi-currency support
• Reliable transaction processing with audit trails and reconciliation
• Backend infrastructure for instant international money transfers, including asynchronous processing, idempotent transaction handling, and distributed ledger or balance tracking systems.

Data-Driven Risk and Decision Systems: High-performing lending platforms rely on continuous data processing backed by:

• Transaction-level analytics for cash flow-based lending
• Integration with external scoring providers
• Machine learning models for fraud detection and credit risk
• Real-time risk scoring pipelines capable of processing high-volume transactional data streams with low latency.

Compliance by Design: Regulatory requirements must be embedded into system workflows:

• PCI DSS compliance for payment data
• AML, KYC, and KYB verification pipelines
• Regional compliance (e.g., GDPR, local financial regulations)
• Continuous monitoring and audit-ready infrastructure to support financial operations across jurisdictions.

Scalable Architecture for Embedded Finance: To serve growing ecosystems of merchants and partners, platforms must be designed for scale:

• Microservices-based architecture with independent scaling
• API-first approach for easy embedding into third-party platforms, supported by custom API development
• High availability and fault tolerance for financial operations
• Multi-tenant architecture to support SaaS platforms and embed lending capabilities into their products.