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A multi-tenant ledger, KYC stack, and payments rail rebuilt to clear AfCFTA-grade compliance across Ghana, Nigeria, Côte d'Ivoire and Senegal.
“Spalce did not just build the platform — they built the operating cadence that let us ship in four jurisdictions without breaking any of them.”
Pan-African Payments Co. came to us with an MVP that worked in one market and was breaking in three more. In nine months we rebuilt the ledger as a Temporal-orchestrated, country-aware system, wired in tiered KYC for each regulator (BoG, CBN, BCEAO), and replatformed onto a multi-region Kubernetes footprint. The company hit $480M in year-one volume across four corridors and now treats new-country launch as a six-week runbook rather than a quarterly project.
Pan-African Payments Co. had product-market fit in Ghana with a wallet that interoperated with MoMo and bank rails, but every attempt to extend to Nigeria, Côte d'Ivoire, or Senegal ran into the same wall: the codebase had been written for one country, one regulator, one set of compliance rules. A second deployment meant a fork. By the time three forks were in flight, engineering was spending 70% of its week reconciling the differences, and the CBN audit in Lagos had stalled the product behind a six-month backlog of compliance fixes.
The board's mandate to the new CPO was sharp: be live in four countries with one core platform by the next fiscal year, or wind the expansion plan down. The team had nine months. They needed a partner who could carry both the engineering work and the regulator conversations across BoG, CBN, BCEAO, and the AfCFTA cross-border payments framework — not just a contractor with a Jira board.
We started with a two-week diagnostic where two of our principal engineers and one regulator-experienced architect embedded with the client's tech and compliance leads. The output was not a deck — it was a sequenced 36-week plan with a country-by-country regulator engagement track running alongside it. We made the call early to keep the existing Node API gateway and rebuild only the ledger and KYC engines, in Go, behind it. That kept the mobile apps shipping while the new core came online.
We organised the work into three pods — Ledger, KYC, and Platform — each with a Spalce tech lead and a client engineer paired on every PR. Temporal handled the workflows that crossed corridors (cross-border settlement, sanctions screening, reversal queues), so retries and idempotency were no longer ad-hoc. Compliance was treated as a first-class subsystem with its own SLOs, not a downstream consumer of logs.
The new core is a country-aware, multi-currency ledger in Go, fronted by a Kafka event spine and orchestrated by Temporal. Each country is modelled as a tenant with its own regulator profile, ID-document schema, AML thresholds, and reporting cadence. Adding Senegal at the end of the engagement took six weeks of configuration work, no schema changes.
“We used to talk about country launches as projects. Now we talk about them as configurations. That shift, more than any single feature, is what unlocked the next three years of growth.”
Nigeria went live in month five with full CBN approval. Côte d'Ivoire followed in month seven. Senegal — the test of the new tenant model — was live and clearing transactions thirty-eight days after the country profile was opened. By the end of year one, the platform was processing $480M across the four corridors and supporting 2.4M active users, with the operational team running on a single on-call rotation instead of four.
The compliance dividend was just as significant. Monthly returns to all three regulators are now generated automatically; the quarterly compliance review that used to consume two engineers full-time is a one-hour meeting. The CFO has since cited the platform's auditable ledger as a material factor in the company's Series B.
The biggest lesson was that compliance is an engineering surface, not a paperwork surface. Once we modelled regulators as first-class tenants with their own SLOs, every other piece of the architecture clarified itself. The second lesson was about pairing: keeping a client engineer on every PR with a Spalce lead created a knowledge-transfer engine that left the client team genuinely capable of running and extending the platform without us.
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