From batch ACH to a 24/7 real-time payment platform.
BILL moved money the old way — bank-to-bank ACH, batch-driven, bound to banking hours, weekends, and holidays. I led the transformation to an instant, wallet-based platform that settles money inside the system in real time, and became the primary platform for processing 90% of payment volume as of today and enabling financial products driving roughly half of core company revenue.
Figures are approximate, illustrative estimates used for interview framing.
BILL was great. BILL was slow.
The complaints from customers were consistent, and it wasn't about features or site speed. It was the money.
BILL's accounts-payable product let customers pay vendors and suppliers. Both sides joined the network and linked bank accounts, and payments primarily moved bank-to-bank across the rails.
The primary rail was ACH — reliable, but batch-driven and never naturally real-time. Settlement depended on bank schedules, and it stalled on weekends and holidays. Money crawled across days while customers waited.
Customers loved the product but kept saying the same thing. The slowness wasn't page performance — it was payment processing speed, and it was the thing standing between BILL and a far bigger business.
Move money inside the platform — instantly.
Instead of pushing every payment through bank networks over days, hold balances in wallets and settle inside the platform: debit one wallet, credit another, in real time.
The model was familiar from wallets like PayPal and Venmo: customers hold balances, and money is debited from one wallet and credited to another immediately.
Start with domestic USD-to-USD movement; build toward multi-currency wallets and global receivers. Cleanly separate the three motions — money coming in, money moving inside the platform, and money going out to external bank accounts — so each could evolve on its own.
A wallet platform, built to financial-grade standards.
Not a single product — a core money-movement platform designed to carry many products over time.
Hold and move value in real time
A wallet construct holds customer money and supports debit/credit between wallets instantly, with secure balance management and full transaction history.
From daily to hourly
Reconciliation around every wallet transaction — moved from daily to hourly — so each movement can be validated, with exception handling, fixes, and operational controls.
Every debit and credit must balance
Immutable transaction ledgers ensure money is never created from nothing or lost in flight. Strong auditability is built in — every entry traceable, every movement provable.
Fast, but never blind
An orchestration layer integrates risk systems, so money moves only when risk rules allow. Working-capital products add underwriting and credit-risk checks — balancing speed, compliance, and revenue.
Speed only matters when it comes with correctness, security, and trust.
From a monolith to a modular wallet platform.
The platform went from a single ACH-first monolith to a modular, real-time wallet platform — with many more ways for money to move in and out. Toggle between before and after.
One platform. A portfolio of products. Payment Monetization.
The platform became a product engine — each new product pushed the platform to become more capable and more resilient.
Instant Transfer
Receivers access funds days earlier instead of waiting on ACH timing.
Supplier Payment Plus
Consolidate multiple payments into one, with reconciliation and configurable detail for each payment.
Invoice financing
Advance against receivables, underwritten through the orchestration layer.
BILL Cash Account
An FDIC-insured, interest-bearing DDA account delivering banking-as-a-service capabilities on the same core money rails.
Card products
Card acquiring and virtual-card issuing on the same core money rails.
Global Multi Currency Wallet
Multi-currency wallets extending the platform to global receivers.
Internal Operations
Finance and CS-ops move money for operational needs and customer complaints.
Debit Card*
Debit card on the BILL Cash Account — spend held balances directly on the same rails.
Crypto / Stablecoin*
Monetize USD volume into LATAM and ASEAN corridors via stablecoin rails.
The numbers — and the punchline.
A high-volume, 24/7 platform where a thin slice of monetized volume carries roughly half the business.
A small slice of volume. Half the business.
The platform is the rail for nearly all volume — but the monetized products on top are where the revenue concentrates.
The takeaway: the platform is both core infrastructure and a major revenue enabler — ~10–12% of volume generating roughly 50% of core company revenue.
24/7 is people, process, and tooling — not just uptime.
Once money moves in real time, reliability stops being a feature and becomes the product.
Observability was built around the platform: Datadog monitoring, error tracking, and anomaly detection, wired to PagerDuty on-call schedules with clear team-level ownership and manager escalation paths.
Every team was accountable for the services it owned. A disciplined incident-response process with post-incident RCA kept failures from repeating and made the platform more robust over time.
And resilience was designed in, not bolted on — when a downstream provider failed, fallback routing kept customer promises intact.
My leadership principles.
At its core this is a platform story — a money-movement platform with revenue products layered on top, enabling product teams to build and thrive on shared rails.
Revenue
Monetized products on the core rails became the company's growth engine — roughly half of core revenue.
Reliability & Resilience
24/7 money movement with fast detection and recovery, strong test coverage, and fallback routing.
Release (Frequency)
A release window compressed from hours to minutes — ship safely and often.
Connected customer pain to revenue strategy
Turned “BILL is slow” into a platform thesis instead of a point fix.
Built for now and for next
Solved the immediate problem with a platform that could carry products that didn't exist yet.
Balanced the competing forces
Held speed, security, risk, compliance, and revenue in tension — and shipped.
Shifted teams to platform thinking
Pushed teams past single-product reflexes toward reusable, shared capabilities.
Installed operating discipline
Created the metrics, incident process, and accountability that a 24/7 system demands.