Super Payments is on a mission to offer free payments to businesses, forever. A new way to pay and shop via their platform means 0% fees to merchants and rewards for loyal shoppers. 

Transactions are at the core of their business, and in 2024 Super migrated to TigerBeetle as the new source of truth for their financials. From build versus buy, the price(lessness) of confidence, and what everyone underestimates about transaction processing––here’s the story.

Goodbye Fees, Hello Super Payments

Founded in 2022 by Samir Desai CBE, co-founder of Funding Circle, Super have raised $30M and are backed by the same group of investors behind Facebook, Spotify, Stripe, and Monzo, as well as angel investors including ex-CEO of WorldPay Sir Ron Kalifa.

Transactions feed all reporting and settlement processes, and last year, in pursuit of safety and performance, they began to explore ledger alternatives.

Build versus Buy: Complexity and Necessary Constraints

With back to back roles in fintech at Nutmeg, Native Finance, and now Super, CTO Aidan McGinley has seen many ledgers, built and rebuilt. Especially at startups, his observation is they’re almost always homegrown. Double-entry accounting is a common requirement, but despite research at various points, there was never anything available that was a fit for startups:

“You ended up in enterprise ERP territory, that tried to be ‘all things’. It always blew my mind, all these startups in London, off building their own ledgers.”

According to McGinley, engineers underestimate the complexity of a ledger and accounting system, and what it takes to achieve financial consistency. The complexity required to enforce necessary constraints is evidenced in delivery and performance challenges. 

Proof of concept and Alternatives

Running a proof of concept with one provider, throwing Super’s transaction load at the database, it became clear that the throughput and transactions per second (TPS) they required were simply “not there”, let alone anticipating scale over the next decade to come. Which was when a fellow CTO mentioned TigerBeetle.

Super’s “many-to-many” relationship of merchants, accounts, and shared global account, meant a lot of “hot accounts” and a critical bottleneck of row locks held across the network—but TigerBeetle was designed to solve this very challenge.

“We didn’t have in mind what we wanted for TPS, although that is what we ended up fixating on. Side-by-side, there was no comparison with TigerBeetle.”

Implementation: Less than Three Months

Super charges 0% fees for businesses to accept payments, and scale is critical for success. 

“In the early days, it’s all about moving quickly and adapting fast. While scale is always a long-term goal, the priority early on is rapid iteration and responsiveness. You build, refine, and improve continuously to meet the needs of your customers and the market.”

TigerBeetle offered the right set of primitives, at the right level of abstraction, to allow Super to build precisely what was needed. From first contact to production, implementation took less than three months. There was a necessary learning curve, which required engineers to “think like an accountant”.

If they were doing things over? “Start with TigerBeetle and save a good few months”, McGinley says with a smile.

The Price(lessness) of Confidence

Today, Super has a single source of truth for their financials, a robust settlement system based on double-entry accounting enforced by the database. But beyond engineering, what TigerBeetle has delivered to the business is confidence.

“Our financial operations team has a ledger that they know how to interact with, and export to their accounting platform. And they know that it reflects what actually happened. They are very happy it’s there, instead of mucking around with spreadsheets.”

It’s in the final minutes of our conversation that Aidan says: “Don’t be building your own ledger”. We think that would make a great bumper sticker. 

If you’re a startup thinking of building your own ledger, think again and talk to us instead.