Pesawise is an all-in-one platform for business payments. In 2020, Co-Founder and CEO Jamal Khan observed Kenyan finance teams wasting time on reconciliation, compared to their European counterparts he’d come across while working in London.

After validating ideas, building their ledger, and applying for a payments license, Pesawise launched operations in 2023 and won fifty customers within six months. Then they started to experience sharp month-end performance issues:

“Everything around the ledger was fast, using modern technology, but when money was moving, things started becoming very slow.”

These bottlenecks were stressful internally, and impacted customers. As luck would have it, TigerBeetle was nearing production. In 2024, Pesawise migrated millions of historical transactions in a weekend, and gained a system of record they trust over their existing system.

The Path to Pesawise

Many can relate to having an idea and buying the domain, but when Kenya-born Jamal bought www.pesawise.com in 2015, while working for Bloomberg in London, time would show he meant business.

“I always wanted to be doing something technical but I didn’t know I’d end up in the payments space. I found myself here because I did computer science at university and then worked for a financial institution and a lot of the systems we were building were transactional in nature, so my path led me towards payments.”

Looking around the market when he returned home to Kenya in 2020, he saw massive inefficiencies compared to Europe. Kenya was early out of the gate on mobile money systems, like M-PESA and Airtel, but business payments were fragmented and inefficient.

“Businesses didn’t know where money was going and how to reconcile it, and the finance teams were suffering, spending far too much valuable time on bookkeeping and ensuring everything was reconciled and up to date.”

From his perspective, systems should have been able to do that job, and the problem wasn’t the mechanism, it was on the data and ledger side, and so the journey began.

Ledger Technology: Accuracy and Speed

Because they’d be moving money, the first step was to apply for licensing, and talk to the banks they’d work closely with to understand the sorts of technology offered (APIs, stores of value) and different channels to which they’d need to connect.

Validation was key in the early days. The minimal viable product they shipped and tested with two merchants was a hit, and the route to traction included a lot of talking to clients and listening carefully to feedback. 

One of the key engineering decisions Pesawise had to make was how to build their ledger; everything that happened around that was more ‘regular’ technology:

“We realized very quickly that when you're building a financial system, you need to be able to store all the incoming and outgoing - or all the credits and debits - for a business. And if they have multiple different virtual accounts or wallets, you have to store the incoming and outgoing per wallet or per virtual account. So we had to build a ledger system.”

And it needed to be accurate. Regulation requires payment providers to have a one-to-one mapping of the money in their trust accounts versus what they display to customers. It was critical that Pesawise account balances were accurate at all times from a regulatory and business-flow perspective.

“There were so many different channels that we’d be using - mobile money channels, bank channels, government payment channels, airtime. It was critical that balances were up to date. Not least because if they aren’t, we can be out of pocket.”

The ledger was a critical piece of infrastructure and Pesawise opted to build it from scratch, self-admittedly not experts in ledger technology, launching operations in 2023. Customers loved the product, and they won fifty in just six months.

With Pesawise, Kenyan businesses enjoyed a single, reconciled, correct view, and it was easy to make and receive payments all in one place, with no need to pull records from different institutions.

Pesawise started to add more payment methods, including government payments. All was bliss. Until month-end.

Battling Row Locks and Month-end Bottleneck Blues

Everything beyond the ledger was fast, using modern technology, but when money was moving, the general purpose database storing their financial transactions became surprisingly slow. 

“With the technology we used, you have these locking mechanisms that take place, particularly when it's the end of the month and people are processing salary payments or supplier payments.”

Payouts needed to happen, suppliers needed to get paid, employees needed to get paid. It was a sensitive time, and this led to stress internally. It started taking a couple of hours, each month, for the general purpose database to process all the transactions, and in those hours, customers would call:

Hey, what's going on? 
Everything was fine during the month. Why is the system being slow now?
Why hasn't my payment been processed? 

“You're just watching the system processing, seeing it is slow, but you can't do anything because if you touch it at that point, there's a lot of backlog.” 

The finance and operations teams faced a lot of backlash over the slower transactions, and there was a lot of manual input that needed to be done. At times, the ledger would fail and there would be inconsistency, requiring them to pause to check it. Even when this was done at the end of the day, it was difficult as incoming transactions never fully stopped.

Jamal started hunting around to see what off-the-shelf products Pesawise could adopt, but the options he found were not simple to spin up. They had a lot of user interfaces, required configuration, and a lot of them were SaaS.

“You had to connect to their instances and couldn't run it in your own cloud or on your own servers. I can't remember where, but I saw TigerBeetle and that opened Pandora's box.”

Jamal was convinced TigerBeetle was exactly what Pesawise needed – not least because it was open source like much of their payment stack – however, it was still pre-production, so he joined the Community Slack channel, started asking questions, and bided his time.

Migrating to TigerBeetle: Schema Match, Balance Match 

TigerBeetle had a very similar schema, or set of data types (accounts with credits and debits, and transfers between accounts) to the existing ledger. This meant Pesawise would be able to take their code, connect to TigerBeetle, migrate all of their data, and quickly start using it for all future transactions. They got everything ready and as soon as TigerBeetle’s production release came out in March 2024, they started right away. Jamal has the golden disc to prove it! 

“When there was the first production release of TigerBeetle, that's when we put in the engineering effort, but we were already prepared with all our data. We had our intraday export formats ready so that on the day of migration, any transactions that happened from that time to midnight, had scripts ready to go.”

The schema match made migration straightforward. 

“TigerBeetle hears the voices of their advocates. We needed to import events. There were a lot of people asking for this feature but we started really following up with the team and they added it to their roadmap. Two months later, it was done, which was amazing. We benefited from the work the team did on core.”

One weekend, when all the systems were ready, they backfilled millions of historical transactions and started using TigerBeetle, monitoring it versus their existing ledger. The balances matched and all went smoothly. After a week, they turned off their old ledger. Including data and system preparation, the migration took two months.

“We didn't want to maintain two systems. We wanted to let go of our old ledger, and have all our data, historical and new, in TigerBeetle, as a single source of truth. The migration was really good and easy to do. TigerBeetle even picked up a couple of bugs in the historical data!” 

Caption: TigerBeetle Founder and CEO Joran Dirk Greef with Jamal Khan, featuring the limited edition Golden Disk created for TigerBeetle’s production release, March 2024.

From Bottleneck to Bliss and Beyond

The slowdown was gone, from one month-end to the next, and with it the operational burden.

“I remember the first month after we switched to TigerBeetle, our operations team asked what was happening! Suddenly, they didn't need to be there on the Friday month-end past 6pm. TigerBeetle has helped so much, not just in terms of tech and speed, also people's time.”

Today, TigerBeetle handles Pesawise's transaction volume comfortably and they have strong consistency across accounts. Before, they'd look at their different ledgers, then at the bank ledgers, and try to match them. Now, they use TigerBeetle to cross-check. 

“TigerBeetle is the source of truth, and the banks and whatever else they're matching against are secondary and should match what TigerBeetle has.” 

Two aspects of TigerBeetle’s engineering that Jamal and team really enjoy:

1. Their systems can comfortably throw many different transfers going across many different accounts and TigerBeetle batches and handles them with ease. There's no need for Pesawise to do any locking. They simply don't need to think about that anymore. As transfers come, they just send them across to TigerBeetle and it handles everything.

2. The fact that it's a distributed system, with multiple nodes. A lot of financial institutions require backups of real-time hot data, and no data loss, to be compliant. With TigerBeetle, that comes out of the box.

“It just runs in the background, doing its job, behaving amazingly.” 

A Fast, Consistent, Cross-Currency Future

For now, TigerBeetle powers Pesawise’s core use case of payments, the ins and outs of their accounts, but in addition to local currency processing, they are looking to process USD and cross-currency conversions, and rate limiting, all of which will happen through TigerBeetle. 

Jamal’s advice to a fellow CEO/CTO:

“For a single source of truth for all your accounting purposes, don't reinvent the wheel and try and build something. Trust a system that's been tested with a hundred years worth of data and scenarios. Leave it to TigerBeetle to do the heavy lifting.”