Formance

Should you build or buy a core ledger? Most teams underestimate what building actually commits them to. Thierry Coopman breaks it down > link in comments

🇺🇸 We're hiring in NYC >> three open roles on our GTM team: - Senior Account Executive - Fintech & Crypto - Business Development Representative - Fintech & Crypto - Senior Demand Generation Manager All NYC-based. Link in comments. #formance #hiring #nyc #fintech

Everyone obsesses over the rails. The real complexity kicks in at the ledger layer >> one of the clearest breakdowns of why 👇 Sam Boboev Formance #stablecoins #ledger #fintech

Build or buy a core ledger—having dealt with this dilemma, I can say it is one of the most pressing decisions. Building software creates pride and control and sometimes it’s right. However, a ledger is different because it is not your product. It is infrastructure that must be correct, resilient, and auditable. It never stops being maintained. The trap is misclassification. Teams treat a ledger like a database problem which it is not. It is a system constrained by accounting rules, audit expectations, and failure scenarios that most product teams do not operate in daily. Engineering complexity is only half the problem. The real cost is continuity. A ledger is not a project. It is a permanent system with compounding obligations. It pulls engineering time away from revenue-generating work and rarely gives it back. Early phase looks attractive. Strong engineers, fast progress, intellectual challenge. However, as you progress at later phase shifts, builders leave and priorities change. The ledger becomes an internal platform nobody owns but everyone depends on. Documentation degrades into tribal knowledge. New engineers inherit risk, not clarity. This is where cost multiplies. Maintenance exceeds build effort. Changes become fragile. Every audit, reconciliation issue, or edge case exposes gaps. You accumulate technical debt in the one place where errors are least tolerated. A ledger also introduces external accountability. Auditors, regulators, finance teams, partners. They do not care how it was built. They care that it is correct, explainable, and consistent under scrutiny. In-house builds fail not because teams cannot code them, but because they underestimate constraints. You need accounting expertise, compliance understanding, and system design aligned with audit behavior. Without that, you build a system that works until it is tested. Buying shifts the problem. You trade control for time, tested assumptions, and operational stability Buying is rational under three conditions: 1. Limited resources. A reliable ledger requires backend engineers, database design, accounting expertise, and ongoing compliance alignment. This is not a small team effort. Costs persist post-launch. 2. Time pressure. Compliance timelines do not wait for internal builds. If you need readiness under frameworks like MiCA, building is rarely viable. 3. Low tolerance for error. Ledger failure is not a minor bug. It creates legal exposure, audit failure, capital friction, and operational breakdown. If capability is uncertain, external systems with proven audit history dominate. The decision is not build vs buy but where to allocate irreversible focus. If the ledger is not your product, building it turns infrastructure into your product by accident. 👉 Subscribe for more insights https://lnkd.in/d94JgWBU Insights by Formance

If you missed 11:FS After Dark in London, the episode is now live > worth your time. Clément Salaün was on stage debating Robinhood's family plan, Irish banks taking on fintechs, and whether Monzo's Year in Review went too far. Link in comments.

I'll be in Paris next week for Paris Blockchain Week - Wednesday 15 and Thursday 16. If you're there and want to connect, drop me a message.

Most teams think payment tracking is a logging problem. It is a ledger problem. A single cross-border payment typically touches four independent systems. A bank for fiat in, a custody provider for stablecoins, an exchange for FX, and a local bank for payout. None share a transaction ID. None understand the full lifecycle This creates a structural blind spot. At low volume, teams manually reconcile. At scale, this breaks. The US–Mexico corridor alone processes over $5B per month. At 1,000 transactions per day, you are no longer tracking payments. You are running forensic accounting in production  ____ The failure shows up in specific places. -> First, compliance. A payment gets paused mid-flow. You cannot answer whether funds are in custody, in review, or already converted. Each system shows a different state. No system shows the truth. -> Second, failed payouts. A wrong account number leaves funds stranded in local currency. Without per-transaction state tracking, you do not know if the money sits in a bank, an exchange, or a holding account. Support becomes investigation. -> Third, FX leakage. You quote a rate at 16.80. Execution happens at 17.05 or 17.20. Without linking quote and execution per transaction, you cannot measure spread, slippage, or actual revenue. Margin disappears silently. -> Fourth, reconciliation. Bank balances, custody balances, and exchange reports should match. They do not. Teams spend days aligning X, Y, and Z across systems, often without a definitive answer. The core issue is that each system records events, not outcomes. The fix is not more integrations but a single timeline. A proper ledger creates one atomic record of the payment lifecycle. The same transaction tracks USD in, USDC movement, FX conversion, and MXN payout. Every step is linked through a single identifier, and every state transition is explicit. That unlocks concrete use cases. You can answer “where is the money” with one query, not four systems. You can measure FX revenue and slippage per transaction, not per month. You can prove to regulators exactly when compliance held and released funds. You can resolve failed payouts instantly by locating funds in holding states. The shift is clear. Moving money is solved, but we still have not solved how to record it. The system that wins is the one that turns fragmented events into a single, auditable narrative. Insights by Formance

Had the chance to speak at Columbia Business School last week to a great audience of MBA students. We talked about my journey from Alsid to Formance, building and scaling tech companies as a non-technical founder, open source as a go-to-market strategy, fundraising, and where fintech is heading. The fun and the less fun parts. Thanks Noa Barzelay, Cindy Morand, and Andrew Oestreicher for having me!

On-chain confirmation answers one question: has the blockchain recorded this transfer as immutable? It says nothing about whether the funds are available, whether the issuer will permit their movement, or whether the fiat backing them has actually settled. Stablecoin finality unfolds across three distinct layers—blockchain, issuer, and fiat—each governed by a different authority, each with its own failure modes. A system that treats confirmation as settlement has collapsed three separate risk profiles into one implicit assumption. That assumption holds until it doesn't. We wrote about how to model finality correctly: as a set of conditions that resolve over time, each gating different product actions. What makes a system operationally reliable is keeping what happened in the ledger separate from what the user can actually do with their balance.