Total Payments: Intelligent Payment Routing
An intelligent payment routing engine that sits between a bank's core system and its payment rails, automatically selecting the optimal path for every payment based on cost, speed, or reliability.
The Problem
Financial institutions were managing multiple common payment methods (wires, SWIFT, ACH) through separate, siloed systems with no centralized routing layer. The decision of which method to use for a given payment was largely manual: made at the branch level for smaller transactions, or escalated to treasury operations for larger ones. Neither approach was optimized. Payments defaulted to familiar rails regardless of cost or speed, and the expertise required to make better decisions wasn't consistently available across the organization. The result was unnecessary cost, slower settlement, and a process that didn't scale.
The Solution
Total Payments is a routing engine that sits between the bank's core system and the payment rails, automatically selecting the optimal path for every payment based on the bank's configured objective: cost, speed, or reliability. When a payment instruction arrives, the engine evaluates all available rails in real time (SWIFT, Fedwire, Same-Day ACH, Standard ACH) and routes accordingly. In the example above, fee optimization routes a $48,500 vendor payment via Standard ACH at $0.25, saving $37.75 versus the default SWIFT wire.
Payment Initiation
James Hartley
First Republic Bank
Pacific Ventures LLC
Wells Fargo
Total Payments
Routing Engine
Awaiting payment…
Route Analysis
Recipient Bank
Wells Fargo
Awaiting transfer…
My Role
I led this initiative end-to-end, from defining the routing logic and configuration model, to working with engineering on the decisioning engine, and driving the commercial rollout with First Republic Bank as the platform's anchor client. The implementation required tight coordination across the bank's treasury, technology, and operations teams to replace live wire infrastructure with zero downtime.
Impact
Total Payments became the foundation for a new category of configurable bank infrastructure, with First Republic Bank's successful deployment used as the reference case for subsequent enterprise sales.
$2B+
Payment volume processed through the platform
60%
Average reduction in wire processing costs for pilot clients
Learnings
Routing logic is easy to build and hard to trust. Bank clients need extensive parallel-run evidence before they'll switch live payment flows off legacy rails.
Configurability is a double-edged sword: giving banks full control over routing objectives is powerful, but without sensible defaults, implementation timelines stretch and support burden grows.
The anchor client relationship defines the product. First Republic's specific requirements shaped features that turned out to be universal, so investing deeply in that first deployment paid dividends across every subsequent sale.