Studio998 runs payment collection, compliance programs and technology infrastructure as a single operating layer, so a company selling into forty markets does not have to staff the seam between them.
The reconciliation gap between three tools that each worked correctly on their own.
Studio998 started in 2019 with a narrow problem. A cross-border seller we advised was running three systems that disagreed with each other: a payment gateway that reported one settled amount, an accounting package that recorded another, and a spreadsheet where an operations manager reconciled the difference by hand every Friday. None of the tools was broken. The operating model was.
Payments, compliance and infrastructure are usually bought separately, from vendors who do not share a data model, a ledger or an on-call rotation. The client is left to staff the seam: someone has to translate between an acquirer’s reason codes and the general ledger, between a regulator’s document request and an engineer’s deployment window, between a new market’s licensing timeline and the checkout’s release cycle. That seam is where cross-border operations actually fail, and it rarely fails loudly.
We built Studio998 to own the seam. One team runs collection and settlement, one team runs the compliance and risk program, one team runs the platform both depend on, and all three work from the same ledger, the same monitoring stack and the same incident process. Clients get one monthly invoice, one named operations contact and one place to look when a number does not reconcile.
The companies we work with tend to look similar: roughly $1M to $50M in annual online revenue, selling into more than one currency, with a small finance or operations team that cannot hire a payments specialist, a compliance officer and a site reliability engineer in the same year. They are past the point where a plug-in will do and well short of the point where building in-house makes sense.
Seven years later the shape of the work has not changed, only the scale: 40+ markets, more than $12M processed each month and a 24×7 network operations center in Riverview, Florida. We are still measured on the same thing we were in 2019 — whether the numbers agree at month end without anyone building a spreadsheet to make them agree.
Volume, uptime and market figures are representative of typical client activity and are illustrative, not a guarantee of performance. Client names shown are representative illustrations.
No funding announcements. The milestones that changed how the work gets done.
Studio998 opens with one client and one remit: reconcile cross-border card collections that a gateway, an accounting package and a spreadsheet could not agree on.
A Singapore payout corridor goes live through ap-southeast-1, and the settlement engine adds its first non-USD ledger with a documented FX conversion step.
Compliance stops being a response to client questionnaires and becomes a standing control set, with evidence produced by the deployment pipeline rather than assembled before an audit.
Cross-client volume clears $5M per month, which funds the first dedicated treasury and reconciliation team and moves month-end close from nine days to three.
Three-shift NOC coverage begins in Riverview, with tested failover between us-east-1, eu-west-1 and ap-southeast-1 and a 15-minute severity-one acknowledgment target.
More than $12M is now processed monthly across 40+ markets at 99.9% measured uptime, with local rails including PIX, UPI, PayNow and iDEAL in production for client accounts.
These are operational decisions with consequences, not values statements for a wall.
Every engagement starts with a written scope that names the corridors, the entities and the failure modes we are accountable for. If a client cannot explain what we do in one sentence, we documented it badly. We publish reason codes, fee breakdowns and settlement calendars instead of summary dashboards that hide the detail.
A process is either automated or it is not reliable. Each one has a named owner, a runbook and a measured error budget, and each incident produces a written review with corrective actions tracked to closure. We would rather report a missed service level early than explain it at the quarterly review.
Controls are configured before the first transaction, never retrofitted after an audit finding. KYB checks, sanctions screening, data residency and retention rules are enforced by the platform, so a new corridor cannot go live with them switched off. Where a regulation is ambiguous we take the stricter reading and tell the client why.
Engagements run for years because the work compounds: each corridor added makes the next one faster to open. We do not take on volume we cannot support properly, and we will tell a prospect when an in-house hire is the better answer. Renewal is decided by whether the numbers agreed at month end.
Four people own the functions clients depend on, and their names appear on the escalation path.
Fifteen years in cross-border acquiring and treasury, most recently running merchant services for a regional US bank. Founded Studio998 in 2019 and still chairs the weekly reconciliation review.
Built and operated card platforms through two PCI DSS certifications at previous fintechs. Owns engineering, infrastructure and data, and holds the severity-one escalation for the platform.
Former AML officer at a licensed money services business. Leads KYB, sanctions screening, data residency decisions and the SOC 2 control observation window for the in-progress Type II audit.
Ran multi-market onboarding for a logistics platform across EMEA and APAC. Owns client operations, the NOC escalation process and the quarterly business review calendar.
Team profiles shown are representative.
Coverage is organized around clearing windows and time zones, not around an office map.
Figures are indicative and updated periodically.
If you sell in more than one currency, the seam between payments, compliance and infrastructure is where the work is. We would rather show you how we run it.