Engineering
Why we built our own ledger instead of using double-entry libraries
The specific reconciliation problems that pushed us toward a custom ledger architecture, and what we'd do differently.
Embedded payments infrastructure
Move money without becoming a payments company
Northfield gives marketplaces and vertical SaaS platforms a single API for payouts, split payments, and compliance, so your engineering team ships payment features instead of maintaining them.
- Payment volume processed
- $14B+
- Payment volume processed
- Platforms onboarded
- 640+
- Platforms onboarded
- API uptime
- 99.99%
- API uptime
Trusted by teams at
- Hollins Home Services
- Makerlane
- Quayside Rentals
- Wardley Logistics Hub
- Bramblewick Bookings
- Tillage Farm Exchange
Platform
One API for the entire payments stack
Northfield replaces a patchwork of banking partners, compliance vendors, and custom ledger code with a single, audited platform.
Split payments
Automatically route funds between platforms, vendors, and sellers with configurable fee logic on every transaction.
Instant payouts
Same-day and instant payout rails across 34 countries, with automatic fallback to standard ACH or SEPA transfers.
KYC & onboarding
Automated identity verification and risk scoring for every seller or contractor joining your platform.
Compliance & reporting
Built-in tax form generation, AML monitoring, and regulatory reporting across every market you operate in.
Ledger & reconciliation
A real-time ledger that reconciles automatically, so finance teams stop closing books with spreadsheets.
Dispute management
Automated chargeback response with evidence templates tuned to marketplace and platform transaction types.
Platforms trust Northfield with real money movement
- Countries supported
- 34
- Countries supported
- Average integration time
- 3 weeks
- Average integration time
- Support response time
- < 15 min
- Support response time
- Net revenue retention
- 134%
- Net revenue retention
Customer stories
Platforms that stopped building payments in-house
How marketplaces and vertical SaaS platforms use Northfield to launch payment features in weeks instead of quarters.
Home services marketplace
Hollins Home Services
Migrated 40,000 active contractors from weekly batch payouts to instant same-day transfers without a single day of payment downtime during cutover.
6xfaster contractor payout times
Creator marketplace
Makerlane
Replaced a custom-built ledger and three separate banking integrations with Northfield's unified API, freeing two full-time engineers for product work.
-70%reduction in engineering time spent on payments
About Northfield
Founded by engineers who built payments the hard way first
Northfield was founded in 2017 by former payments engineers from two large marketplaces who had each independently built (and rebuilt) split payment infrastructure from scratch. We built the platform we wish had existed the first time.
- Boring reliability
- Payment infrastructure should be the least interesting part of your product, in the best way.
- Compliance built in
- Regulatory requirements are handled at the platform level, not bolted on per customer.
- Real support, fast
- Every customer gets a named integration engineer, not a ticket queue.
- Transparent pricing
- No hidden interchange markups. Our fee structure is published and the same for every customer at a given volume tier.
Leadership
Owen MacKenzie
Co-Founder & CEO
Simone Delacroix
Co-Founder & CTO
Farid Hossein
VP, Compliance
Willa Thompson
VP, Customer Engineering
What engineering leaders say
“We quoted six months to build split payments ourselves. Northfield had us in production in nineteen days with better compliance coverage than we would have built.”
Nadia Okonkwo
VP Engineering, Hollins Home Services
“Their reconciliation ledger alone saved our finance team roughly a week of manual work every single month.”
Peter Vandersloot
Head of Finance, Makerlane
“Every other payments vendor we evaluated wanted a six-figure minimum before they'd return a call. Northfield's team was in our Slack within a day.”
Grace Adebayo
CTO, Bramblewick Bookings
Engineering blog
From the Northfield engineering team
Platform strategy
The real cost of building split payments in-house
A breakdown of engineering time, compliance overhead, and opportunity cost we've seen across dozens of migrations.
Payments infrastructure
How instant payout rails work across 34 countries
A practical look at the banking rail differences between instant, same-day, and standard transfer methods globally.
Frequently asked questions
Most platforms are in production within three weeks using our SDKs. Complex multi-country rollouts can take six to eight weeks depending on compliance requirements.
Stop maintaining payment infrastructure you didn't want to build
Talk to an integration engineer about your platform's payment flows. Most teams get a working sandbox integration within a day.