Atmora Tech

Industry

Payments and risk systems that clear on time

Payment rails, risk engines and core-adjacent systems built by people who have run them at 03:00 on a settlement night.

Context

Technology in Banking & Financial Services

We build the systems that sit next to your core: payment gateways and message translators, limit and exposure engines, onboarding and KYC orchestration, treasury reporting, and the reconciliation jobs nobody puts on a slide. The work is shaped by hard external dates — ISO 20022 scheme cutovers, DORA register submissions, quarterly regulatory returns — so our delivery plans are built backwards from filing deadlines rather than from sprint counts.

Our engineers work in dual-run: new component alongside old, differences logged per transaction, cutover only when the delta report is clean for a defined number of business days. That is slower than a big-bang release and we say so up front. This is not a licensed core banking product. If you need a new ledger of record, buy a packaged core from a vendor who will carry the regulatory liability, and bring us in for the integration, migration and decommissioning work around it.

11,400/sec
peak card authorisations sustained on a platform we built for Cordage Bank
31%
fall in AML false positives after feature and threshold rework
0
missed settlement cut-offs across a 19-month payments migration

Challenges

What actually keeps this sector awake

Not generic disruption — the specific constraints that shape every technology decision here.

  • ISO 20022 migration with no room to slip

    Scheme cutover dates do not move. Truncated MT address fields, unstructured remittance data and purpose codes that were never captured mean the mapping is a data-quality project disguised as a message format project. Most banks discover this six months late.

  • A core with a data model designed in 1984

    Overnight batch windows, no real-time balance, and business rules living in COBOL copybooks that three people can read. Every new channel adds another screen-scrape or nightly extract, and the reconciliation burden grows faster than the feature list.

  • Operational resilience you have to evidence

    DORA and equivalent regimes require a maintained register of ICT third parties, tested exit plans and scenario testing with documented outcomes. Teams that treat this as a policy exercise fail the first supervisory review because the technical evidence does not exist.

  • Financial crime alerts nobody can clear

    Rules tuned in 2016, false positive rates above 95 per cent, and an analyst team measured on queue depth. Model changes stall because nobody can prove to compliance that the new threshold does not miss typologies the old one caught.

Approach

How we address them

  • Payment message translation and validation

    A translation layer between MT, ISO 20022, domestic scheme formats and your core, with validation before submission rather than repair after rejection. Message-level replay, structured party data enrichment, and a differences report for every dual-run day.

  • Strangler-pattern core modernisation

    New capabilities land in a service layer with its own datastore, fed by change data capture from the core. Traffic moves function by function — balance enquiry, then payment initiation, then standing orders — with rollback available at each step.

  • Decisioning that survives model governance

    Feature stores with lineage, challenger models scored in shadow against production for a full quarter, and reason codes on every decline. We favour gradient-boosted trees with SHAP explanations over deep networks here because the explanation is a regulatory artefact.

  • Resilience engineering with an audit trail

    Dependency mapping down to the third-party API, recovery time objectives tested rather than declared, chaos experiments run against pre-production with evidence retained, and exit plans proven by actually standing the workload up elsewhere.

Services

Relevant practices

Products

Platforms used in this sector

Proof

Work in this sector

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