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Hexploits

Product engineering

Core payments engineering: Faster Payments, BACS and SEPA

Core payments engineering is the design and build of the systems that move money over the UK and EU payment rails: Faster Payments for near-instant sterling transfers, BACS for Direct Debit and Direct Credit on its three-day cycle, CHAPS for high-value same-day settlement, and SEPA Credit Transfer and SEPA Instant for euro payments. Hexploits builds and modernises the ledgers, payment initiation, reconciliation and exception handling behind these rails, for firms that hold their own scheme access and for those that reach the rails through a sponsor bank or an agency arrangement.

Request a proposalTalk to an engineer

A named engineer replies within one working day. A written scope and an indicative price within two.

Who this is for

  • Payment institutions and e-money firms running their own ledger and scheme connectivity.
  • Lenders, platforms and marketplaces that pay out and collect at volume through a sponsor bank or a payments-as-a-service provider.
  • Finance and operations directors whose reconciliation still finishes in a spreadsheet.
  • Firms whose payments code was written by a supplier who has since left.

What you get

Deliverables, not slogans. Each one appears in the statement of work.

  • A double-entry ledger with immutable postings, balance snapshots and an audit trail an auditor can replay.
  • Payment initiation, status tracking and returns handling for Faster Payments, BACS (including ARUDD, ADDACS and AUDDIS files), CHAPS and SEPA Credit Transfer and SEPA Instant.
  • Automated reconciliation against scheme and bank statements, with a queue for the exceptions that need a person and a report of what was matched and how.
  • Idempotent, replay-safe integration with the rails, so a retried instruction never pays twice.
  • Confirmation of Payee, sanctions screening and limits enforced before an instruction leaves the building.
  • Monitoring of settlement windows, scheme cut-offs and file submission deadlines, with alerts routed to an engineer.

Our engineers work across the major languages, frameworks and cloud platforms. We build on the stack you already run, with technology choices explained in writing before work begins.

How it is delivered

The same four stages as every Hexploits engagement, applied to this capability.

  1. Stage 1

    Discovery

    Two to four weeks. We map the flows of money, the scheme access you hold or borrow, the reconciliation breaks, and the controls a regulator or auditor expects to see. Output: a written scope with a fixed figure or capped estimate.

  2. Stage 2

    Build

    Ledger and rail integration first, with a working demonstration every fortnight against real scheme test environments, and reconciliation built alongside rather than after.

  3. Stage 3

    Launch

    Parallel running against the existing process, a reconciliation of every posting between the two, and cutover with a rollback plan.

  4. Stage 4

    Operate

    Monitoring of settlement and file deadlines, incident response and small changes under deployment and monitoring, with the audit trail kept current.

Where the team learnt this

Our core team built and ran payments at Modulr Finance and Apexx Global before Hexploits

Modulr is a UK payments and e-money platform with direct access to the Faster Payments and BACS schemes; Apexx Global is a market-leading payment orchestrator. The engineers who built ledgers, scheme connectivity and reconciliation there are the people who lead this work at Hexploits. They are named in the proposal.

Talk to an engineer

How success is measured

Every engagement agrees its measures and the measurement period in writing before work starts.

  • Reconciliation breaks per day and time to clear them, measured before and after.
  • Failed and returned payments as a share of volume, with the reason codes.
  • Time from instruction to settlement against each scheme’s expected window.
  • Ledger integrity: every posting balanced, every balance reproducible from the log.

Proof

Case studies with numbers, and reviews linked to Google where they were left there.

98%Faster page loads

Gradvisor · Charity · 8 weeks to production, then ongoing

98% faster page loads and a 12% smaller cloud bill for a UK careers charity

12% lower cloud cost · 2 days to ship a change
75%Under the original budget

swarmd.ai · Software vendor · 6 months

Enterprise AI control plane delivered in six months at 75% under budget for a UK software vendor

75% ahead of the original timeline · 6 months from blank page to paying enterprise customers

  • Director, Lothbury

    “Top quality delivery, and reasonable price. Will be using again.”

    Peter DentonDirector, LothburyRead the review

  • Director, Gradvisor

    “Fantastic company and our development partner for Gradvisor, a social mobility careers platform with national ambitions. Extremely responsive and mission-oriented. Cameron owns any shortfalls humbly - rare for IT providers. Thinks like a client too.”

    Tushar PrabhuDirector, GradvisorRead the review

Questions we get asked

What is the difference between Faster Payments, BACS and CHAPS?
Faster Payments settles sterling transfers in seconds, 24 hours a day, up to the scheme and bank limits. BACS is a batch scheme on a three-day cycle used for Direct Debit collections and payroll and supplier Direct Credits. CHAPS is same-day, high-value settlement with no upper limit, used for property completions and treasury movements. Most firms need at least two of the three.
Do we need our own scheme access?
Not usually. Direct scheme participation needs a Bank of England settlement account and significant operational commitments. Most firms reach the rails through a sponsor bank, an agency arrangement or a payments-as-a-service provider, and we build to whichever access you hold.
Can you work with SEPA Instant?
Yes. SEPA Instant settles euro payments in under ten seconds, and the EU Instant Payments Regulation now requires euro-area payment service providers to offer it. We build the initiation, status handling and reconciliation for SEPA Credit Transfer and SEPA Instant alongside the UK rails.
What happens to our existing ledger?
It is usually kept running while the new one is built beside it, with every posting reconciled between the two during parallel running. Cutover happens only when the two agree, and the old ledger is retained read-only for the audit period.
Do you handle BACS file formats and reports?
Yes: Standard 18 submission files, and the ARUDD, ADDACS, AUDDIS and AWACS reports that come back, parsed into the ledger and the exception queue rather than read by hand.

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Next step

Request a proposal.

Tell us about the system and the sector. A named engineer replies within one working day. A written scope and an indicative price within two working days of a short scoping call.

Request a proposalTalk to an engineer