Payd

Why B3N is involved

Payd gives freelancers, remote workers and businesses in Africa US dollar and euro account details, stablecoin balances and payouts to mobile money and banks. A product like this never stands still. Payment partners change their terms, rules change, and customers keep asking for new ways to get paid and to pay.

Payd needed to ship financial software continuously without carrying the cost of a large engineering organisation. B3N took on that job: deciding what to build next, building it, and running the delivery system that keeps releases safe.

What we built

The core product. A web app that installs like a native app, an iOS and Android app, account details in two currencies, deposits and withdrawals, transfers, payment links and invoices. We own these as product managers and engineers: we set the scope of each release, build it and watch what customers do after it ships.

A developer platform. A public payments API with guides, examples and an OpenAPI file, so other products can collect payments and send payouts through Payd. The documentation is also published in a plain-text format that AI coding assistants read directly, which shortens integration work for developers who build with them.

Payd Labs. Labs is where new products are tried before they join the main product, and B3N leads it. Labs has produced a hosted checkout that takes mobile money, cards, bank transfers and stablecoins; a stablecoin checkout that settles automatically; treasury tooling for collections and payouts across African markets; and a business account with team roles, approvals, bulk payments, invoices and API access, which is now in build.

Tools for the operations team. Finance and support staff work in screens we built for them: ledger views, payout reviews, wallet administration and a way to share sensitive credentials inside the team without pasting them into chat. Each role sees what it needs and nothing else, so daily operations do not depend on engineers or direct database access.

A move off legacy systems. Payd replaced the systems underneath a live product. We moved historical balances and transactions into a separate data store and kept them readable in the app, so customers kept their history while the new core took over.

How AI changed the way we ship

Most Payd engineering now runs through AI coding agents working under B3N's direction. A feature is split into small slices that can be tested on their own, often across several repositories. Each slice gets a written specification, its own branch and its own tests. Agents build slices in parallel. Every change is reviewed against its specification, and anything touching money, sign-in or customer data gets a second, deeper review before it merges.

Product decisions, releases and anything that cannot be undone stay with people. The result is how much a small team can carry at once: security hardening, a new business product and mobile releases can move in the same week without lowering the bar for review.

What it taught us

• Payments products are operations products. Support, finance and risk need their own tools from the first release.
• New products are cheaper to test next to a live business than inside it. That is why Labs exists, and why B3N Labs works the same way for clients.
• AI speeds up delivery only when the work is cut into pieces small enough to review properly.