The Ledger
Fintech infrastructure,
in practice.
Deep-dives on payments, lending, regulation, and the technology decisions behind modern finance, from the Rise DFC team shipping regulated infrastructure in production.
21
Published stories
6
Topic areas
10
Categories
Editor's desk
Long reads and field notes from engineers, risk, and treasury.
How agentic AI is rewriting credit underwriting in real time
Multi-model agents read structured income data, employment graphs, and behavioral signals to produce risk decisions in under 200ms — with regulator-ready explanations.
Rise Engineering
Platform & infrastructure
FedNow, RTP, and the new default for fintech settlement
Instant rails are no longer optional for advance products. How originators should architect around FedNow, RTP, and sponsor-bank cutoffs.
Rise Product
Earned wage access in 2025: market map and unit economics
EWA is consolidating around flat fees, payroll connectivity, and sponsor-bank models. A practitioner's view of what still works.
Rise Product
Sponsor bank oversight: a practical checklist for fintechs
What your BaaS partner expects before you scale volume — and what examiners ask for when things go wrong.
Rise Compliance
Latest
Recently published across payments, lending, and infrastructure.
Modernizing core banking APIs without the five-year rewrite
Strangler patterns, event buses, and contract tests that let you ship new products while legacy cores keep running.
Rise Engineering
Why we left a public chain for a permissioned DLT
After 18 months on a public L2, we migrated settlement to a consortium chain. Throughput jumped 40× and operational costs fell to near-zero.
Rise Engineering
Float management for advance and wallet products
Treasury isn't back-office when you're prefunding advances. How to model intraday liquidity stress without burning runway.
Rise Compliance
Multi-region active-active without losing your mind
Running active-active across three cloud providers used to mean rewriting your data layer. Modern primitives change the playbook.
Rise Engineering
Payments
2 articles on payments — policy, architecture, and lessons from production.
FedNow, RTP, and the new default for fintech settlement
Instant rails are no longer optional for advance products. How originators should architect around FedNow, RTP, and sponsor-bank cutoffs.
Rise Product
Stablecoins for B2B settlement: hype, friction, and real use cases
When tokenized dollars beat wires — and when they don't. A sober look from teams moving institutional volume.
Rise Product
Lending
2 articles on lending — policy, architecture, and lessons from production.
Earned wage access in 2025: market map and unit economics
EWA is consolidating around flat fees, payroll connectivity, and sponsor-bank models. A practitioner's view of what still works.
Rise Product
Payroll mule rings and advance fraud in 2025
Synthetic employers and staged deposits evolved. Detection signals that still work at scale without killing conversion.
Rise Product
Regulation
3 articles on regulation — policy, architecture, and lessons from production.
Sponsor bank oversight: a practical checklist for fintechs
What your BaaS partner expects before you scale volume — and what examiners ask for when things go wrong.
Rise Compliance
BNPL regulation and the ripple into earned wage access
Disclosure rules and supervisory attention on short-term credit are reshaping adjacent products — even when you're not BNPL.
Rise Compliance
Consumer Duty and embedded finance in the UK
What US teams can learn from FCA expectations on outcomes monitoring — even if you don't serve UK users yet.
Rise Compliance
Infrastructure
3 articles on infrastructure — policy, architecture, and lessons from production.
Modernizing core banking APIs without the five-year rewrite
Strangler patterns, event buses, and contract tests that let you ship new products while legacy cores keep running.
Rise Engineering
Real-time ledger design patterns for fintech products
Double-entry isn't optional. Event sourcing, holds, and reversals — a field guide for engineers shipping money.
Rise Engineering
Designing idempotent payment webhooks that survive retries
Processors retry. Banks duplicate files. Your handlers must not double-pay or double-post — patterns that work in production.
Rise Engineering
Open Banking
2 articles on open banking — policy, architecture, and lessons from production.
Choosing an aggregator in 2026: beyond the feature matrix
Coverage, refresh latency, consent UX, and webhook quality matter more than logo count on a sales deck.
Rise Product
The end of screen scraping
Variable Recurring Payments and FAPI 2.0 will collapse consent overhead for embedded finance. What to plan for in 2026.
Rise Product
Markets
2 articles on markets — policy, architecture, and lessons from production.
Float management for advance and wallet products
Treasury isn't back-office when you're prefunding advances. How to model intraday liquidity stress without burning runway.
Rise Compliance
Treasury operations for neobanks: beyond spreadsheet heroics
Cash positioning, partner settlements, and regulatory buffers — the systems layer VCs don't put on pitch decks.
Rise Compliance
Full archive
Every story in The Ledger — searchable by topic above.
How agentic AI is rewriting credit underwriting in real time
Multi-model agents read structured income data, employment graphs, and behavioral signals to produce risk decisions in under 200ms — with regulator-ready explanations.
Rise Engineering
Why we left a public chain for a permissioned DLT
After 18 months on a public L2, we migrated settlement to a consortium chain. Throughput jumped 40× and operational costs fell to near-zero.
Rise Engineering
Multi-region active-active without losing your mind
Running active-active across three cloud providers used to mean rewriting your data layer. Modern primitives change the playbook.
Rise Engineering
Sub-50ms fraud scoring at the network edge
Pushing inference to PoPs cut decisioning latency by 7×. A practical blueprint for gradient-boosted models at the edge.
Rise Engineering
The end of screen scraping
Variable Recurring Payments and FAPI 2.0 will collapse consent overhead for embedded finance. What to plan for in 2026.
Rise Product
A pragmatic path to post-quantum encryption
NIST has settled the algorithms. Migration work starts now — a playbook for fintech infrastructure teams.
Rise Engineering
FedNow, RTP, and the new default for fintech settlement
Instant rails are no longer optional for advance products. How originators should architect around FedNow, RTP, and sponsor-bank cutoffs.
Rise Product
Earned wage access in 2025: market map and unit economics
EWA is consolidating around flat fees, payroll connectivity, and sponsor-bank models. A practitioner's view of what still works.
Rise Product
Sponsor bank oversight: a practical checklist for fintechs
What your BaaS partner expects before you scale volume — and what examiners ask for when things go wrong.
Rise Compliance
Modernizing core banking APIs without the five-year rewrite
Strangler patterns, event buses, and contract tests that let you ship new products while legacy cores keep running.
Rise Engineering
Float management for advance and wallet products
Treasury isn't back-office when you're prefunding advances. How to model intraday liquidity stress without burning runway.
Rise Compliance
Choosing an aggregator in 2026: beyond the feature matrix
Coverage, refresh latency, consent UX, and webhook quality matter more than logo count on a sales deck.
Rise Product
SOC 2 for fintech startups: what actually matters in year one
Skip checkbox theater. Focus controls on money movement, PII, and production access — the rest can follow.
Rise Engineering
Real-time ledger design patterns for fintech products
Double-entry isn't optional. Event sourcing, holds, and reversals — a field guide for engineers shipping money.
Rise Engineering
BNPL regulation and the ripple into earned wage access
Disclosure rules and supervisory attention on short-term credit are reshaping adjacent products — even when you're not BNPL.
Rise Compliance
Stablecoins for B2B settlement: hype, friction, and real use cases
When tokenized dollars beat wires — and when they don't. A sober look from teams moving institutional volume.
Rise Product
Feature stores for real-time credit decisions
Batch features died when payroll data went live. How we serve consistent vectors across training and inference.
Rise Engineering
Designing idempotent payment webhooks that survive retries
Processors retry. Banks duplicate files. Your handlers must not double-pay or double-post — patterns that work in production.
Rise Engineering
Consumer Duty and embedded finance in the UK
What US teams can learn from FCA expectations on outcomes monitoring — even if you don't serve UK users yet.
Rise Compliance
Treasury operations for neobanks: beyond spreadsheet heroics
Cash positioning, partner settlements, and regulatory buffers — the systems layer VCs don't put on pitch decks.
Rise Compliance
Payroll mule rings and advance fraud in 2025
Synthetic employers and staged deposits evolved. Detection signals that still work at scale without killing conversion.
Rise Product
The Ledger, weekly
Engineering deep-dives and regulatory primers from the Rise team. No fluff — just what we ship in production.