Remittance · South Africa · Compliance
Cross-border money transfer, with the hard part underneath
A South African client needed payments moving in both directions with as few taps as possible. The simple interface is the easy half; the compliance, encryption and calculation underneath it are where the work actually is.
Background
The client
A South African client needed money moving in both directions across borders with as few taps as possible. The visible product is deliberately plain. Everything that makes it difficult sits underneath, where the user never encounters it.
Where it started
The challenge
Cross-border payments are a compliance problem wearing the costume of a payments problem.
Regulation has to be satisfied on both sides of the transfer, and the rules are not the same on each side. Everything has to be encrypted in transit and at rest. The sender has to see exactly what they will pay and exactly what will arrive, before they commit — transparency is not a nice-to-have when someone is sending money home.
The algorithmic side is the most critical part of the build. Rates, fees and reconciliation have to be exactly right, every time. In payments, approximately correct is indistinguishable from wrong, and the error is always somebody’s money.
Approach
What we built
We built the transfer flow to be as short as regulation permits — not as short as possible, which is a different and more dangerous target. Compliance checks and encryption are part of the pipeline rather than bolted on afterwards, so there is no path through the system that skips them.
The calculation logic was written to be transparent and auditable ahead of being fast. Every figure a user is shown can be traced back through the system, which matters both for the user and for the regulator asking about a specific transaction eighteen months later.
Built with
The technology
Mobile
Flutter for cross-platform delivery, native Swift where iOS needed to go deeper than a shared codebase allows, Android Studio for the Android build
Backend
Node.js and Laravel services
Data
MongoDB and PostgreSQL
Infrastructure
Amazon Web Services
Result
The outcome
The app moves money in both directions with a deliberately minimal interface, and has processed over USD 100,000 since 2022 across more than 5,000 installs. The compliance and calculation work sits exactly where it should: somewhere the user never has to think about it.
The visible product is a few taps; the compliance and calculation sit underneath it. Read more about how we approach mobile app development, or see the rest of our work.
Under NDA
This build is covered by a non-disclosure agreement, so we do not publish the client name or a link. If you are weighing a similar project we can walk you through it on a call, or share a local APK or IPA for review. The same protection applies to your work with us.
Portfolio
A decade of work still in production
Selected engagements across software and growth. Many of these systems have been running — and being maintained by us — for years.
Field operations platform
Venaxx Logistics
A dispatcher platform and driver app built in 2014 and still in daily use across three countries. We have maintained and extended it continuously since launch.
Subscription commerce storefront
OrdrrPay
Headless storefront with subscription billing, rebuilt for speed and paired with the acquisition programme that grew it. Now in its fourth year of retained work.
Regulated onboarding flow
Wassira Fintech
A fourteen-step KYC journey rebuilt as a saved, resumable process — completion up substantially without weakening a single compliance control.
Clinic network consolidation
Medcross Healthcare
Nine competing location sites consolidated into one architecture with proper local schema, then a condition-led content library mapped to patient intent.
Next step
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