A 36-week enterprise execution plan covering core platform foundations, an AI & automation layer, and a financial services & ecosystem expansion track — engineered for a focused three-person delivery team, governed under Agile / Scrum at a quarterly cadence.
A focused, capital-efficient build of an enterprise-grade transaction analytics platform — sequenced to derisk delivery, ship value every quarter, and leave a clean architectural seam for the financial-services marketplace that follows.
Paymetryx is positioned to convert raw terminal transaction streams into a defensible analytics product, an AI-led operations layer, and ultimately a financial-services ecosystem. The path to that outcome is not a single program — it is a sequence of three engagements, each of which must stand on its own commercially.
This plan compresses scope into the smallest credible Phase I, defers AI work until a clean data backbone exists, and reserves payment and lending integrations for a Phase III where regulatory perimeter is already mapped. The result: predictable releases, manageable risk surface, and a team of three that is not overdrawn at any point in the calendar.
| Phase | Theme | Duration | Go-live | Primary outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| I | Core Platform Foundation | 16 wks | Wk 16 | Live transaction analytics, admin portal, mobile app. |
| II | AI & Automation Layer | 10 wks | Wk 26 | AI support, predictive insights, conversational BI. |
| III | Ecosystem & Financial Services | 10 wks | Wk 36 | Payments, lending, utilities, merchant marketplace. |
dev → staging → prod, no shortcuts.A layered, event-driven cloud architecture. Channel apps speak to an API gateway; services own their data; an event spine streams every transaction into the analytics estate; AI consumes governed datasets through a model gateway.
Each phase is independently steerable. Phase II depends on Phase I; Phase III depends on Phase I but can run partially in parallel with Phase II from Sprint 11 onwards under a controlled feature-flag regime.
Each column ≈ one calendar month. Bars indicate the active workstream and its owner-weighted intensity.
Sixteen weeks. Eight two-week sprints. Outcome: a live, multi-tenant fintech analytics platform with terminal data flowing end-to-end, customer mobile app in stores, and an internal portal ready for operations teams.
| M# | Milestone | Sprint | Deliverable |
|---|---|---|---|
| M1.1 | Cloud landing zone live | S1 | VPC, IAM, KMS, EKS, baseline observability. |
| M1.2 | Transaction ingestion alpha | S3 | Terminal feed → Kafka → Postgres ledger. |
| M1.3 | Admin portal beta | S5 | Auth, RBAC, dashboards, MIS exports. |
| M1.4 | Mobile app beta (TestFlight + internal track) | S6 | Onboarding, transactions, statements. |
| M1.5 | Phase I GA | S8 | Prod cutover, hypercare started, runbook signed. |
Ten weeks. Five sprints. Outcome: an AI-augmented platform whose support, operations and analytics surfaces are measurably faster and cheaper to run, with provider-agnostic governance from day one.
| M# | Milestone | Sprint | Deliverable |
|---|---|---|---|
| M2.1 | Model gateway in staging | S10 | Provider-agnostic façade with audit + cache. |
| M2.2 | Support assistant beta | S11 | Embedded in mobile + portal under feature flag. |
| M2.3 | Phase II GA | S13 | Insight, ops, conversational BI in production. |
Ten weeks. Five sprints. Outcome: Paymetryx becomes a platform — merchants are onboarded with KYC, third-party services plug into a commission engine, and a reconciliation engine closes the books daily.
| M# | Milestone | Sprint | Deliverable |
|---|---|---|---|
| M3.1 | Payments in sandbox | S14 | End-to-end test charge + refund + webhook. |
| M3.2 | KYC + merchant onboarding live | S15 | First external merchant onboarded. |
| M3.3 | Reconciliation engine in shadow mode | S17 | Daily reports vs. legacy; deltas explained. |
| M3.4 | Phase III GA & programme close | S18 | Full ecosystem live; handover to BAU. |
A three-person delivery team operating under a working-Scrum model. Roles overlap deliberately on the seams: every workstream has a primary and a back-up to absorb leave, illness, and load.
Admin web portal, analytics dashboards, MIS reports, conversational BI surface, internal tooling, and CI for web. Doubles as Scrum Master & ceremonies facilitator.
Customer iOS & Android app, mobile design system, accessibility, store releases, and visual language used across both web and mobile.
Domain services, event spine, data warehouse, AI gateway, agents, security & cloud infrastructure. Acts as Tech Lead and architectural arbiter.
R Responsible (does the work) · A Accountable (single owner) · C Consulted · I Informed
| Workstream | FS | MO | BE | QA | PM/SM | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cloud landing zone & IaC | C | I | A/R | I | C | BE leads with fractional DevOps support in Sprint 1. |
| Transaction core & event spine | C | I | A/R | C | I | Single owner — non-negotiable for ledger integrity. |
| Admin web portal | A/R | C | C | C | I | Mobile dev consulted on shared design tokens. |
| Analytics dashboards & MIS | A/R | I | C | C | I | BE provides governed metric layer; FS surfaces it. |
| Mobile applications (iOS + Android) | C | A/R | C | C | I | UX/UI design system also owned here. |
| Identity, RBAC, audit | C | I | A/R | C | I | Security review at end of Phase I. |
| AI gateway & agents | C | I | A/R | C | C | Provider-agnostic; governance is a hard gate. |
| Conversational analytics surface | A/R | C | R | C | I | Shared accountability with BE — frontmost frontier. |
| Payment gateway & webhooks | C | I | A/R | C | C | Idempotency, replay, signature validation. |
| Loan module + KYC | C | R | A/R | C | C | UX-heavy; mobile dev co-owns flow design. |
| Loyalty & rewards | R | A/R | C | C | I | Customer-facing — owned from the channel surface. |
| Reconciliation engine | C | I | A/R | R | C | Runs in shadow mode for two sprints before cutover. |
| QA strategy & release engineering | C | C | C | A/R | C | Fractional QA lead — 50% in P1, 30% in P2 & P3. |
QA and PM/Scrum Master are fractional, drawn from the practice bench. The three-person core team is permanent for the engagement.
Eighteen two-week sprints, each with a single theme, a sprint goal a steering committee can read in one breath, and a primary owner per workstream. Two-week sprints with mid-sprint review at week one.
| Sprint | Phase | Weeks | Sprint goal | Primary owners | Exit artefact |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| S0 | Pre | W00 | Inception: chartering, environments, backlog, security scoping. | PMBE | Programme charter |
| S1 | P1 | W01–W02 | Cloud landing zone, IAM, KMS, baseline observability, repos. | BEDevOps | IaC merged |
| S2 | P1 | W03–W04 | Terminal ingestion alpha; event spine bootstrapped. | BEFS | Ingest demo |
| S3 | P1 | W05–W06 | Ledger schema GA; transaction read APIs; auth scaffolding. | BEFS | API contracts |
| S4 | P1 | W07–W08 | Admin portal alpha — auth, RBAC, terminal directory. | FSMO | Portal alpha |
| S5 | P1 | W09–W10 | Real-time dashboards + MIS reports v1. | FSBE | MIS v1 |
| S6 | P1 | W11–W12 | Mobile beta — onboarding, transactions, statements. | MOBE | TestFlight build |
| S7 | P1 | W13–W14 | Integrations + notifications; pen-test & hardening. | BEQA | Audit report |
| S8 | P1 | W15–W16 | UAT, performance soak, Phase I production cutover. | QABEFS | GA release |
| S9 | P2 | W17–W18 | Hypercare close-out; model gateway design + spike. | BEPM | Gateway ADR |
| S10 | P2 | W19–W20 | Model gateway in staging; PII redaction; audit log. | BEFS | Gateway alpha |
| S11 | P2 | W21–W22 | AI support assistant beta in mobile + portal under flag. | BEMO | Beta build |
| S12 | P2 | W23–W24 | Insight agent, ops agent, predictive models (advisory). | BEFS | Insights v1 |
| S13 | P2 | W25–W26 | Conversational BI GA; Phase II production release. | FSBEQA | GA release |
| S14 | P3 | W27–W28 | Payment gateway integration + webhook intake. | BEFS | PSP sandbox demo |
| S15 | P3 | W29–W30 | Merchant onboarding + KYC; commission engine alpha. | BEMO | First merchant |
| S16 | P3 | W31–W32 | Loan module + utility bill payments + loyalty ledger. | BEMOFS | Add-ons live |
| S17 | P3 | W33–W34 | Reconciliation engine in shadow mode; subscription billing. | BEQA | Shadow report |
| S18 | P3 | W35–W36 | Phase III GA; programme close; BAU handover. | QABEFSMO | BAU handover |
Chosen for hiring depth, vendor portability, and operational maturity. Nothing exotic — every layer has at least one second-source option pre-identified.
| Layer | Primary | Alternative | Rationale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mobile | React Native + Expo | Native Kotlin / Swift | Single codebase, shared design tokens; native fallback via modules. |
| Web frontend | Next.js · TypeScript · TanStack Query | Remix · Vite | SSR for portal SEO-free internal use; strong typing across boundary. |
| API layer | Node.js (NestJS) + GraphQL Mesh | Go (chi) for hot paths | Productivity-first; selectively port hot paths to Go in Phase III. |
| Domain services | Python (FastAPI) + Node | Java Spring Boot | Polyglot by service ownership; FastAPI for AI-adjacent services. |
| Event streaming | Apache Kafka (AWS MSK) | AWS Kinesis | Schema registry + exactly-once; portable across clouds. |
| OLTP | PostgreSQL 16 (RDS) | Aurora PG | Mature, predictable, supports partitioning for the ledger. |
| OLAP / analytics | ClickHouse Cloud | BigQuery / Snowflake | Sub-second dashboards on terminal-event volumes; cost-efficient. |
| Cache & search | Redis · OpenSearch | Memcached · Elastic | Standard pairing; OpenSearch keeps us off the licence treadmill. |
| Object storage | AWS S3 + Iceberg tables | GCS | Lake-house ready for Phase II + analytics historisation. |
| AI / LLM | Internal model gateway → Anthropic + OpenAI | Self-hosted Llama on GPU pool | Provider-agnostic; gateway enforces redaction and audit. |
| Identity | Keycloak (self-hosted) · OIDC · WebAuthn MFA | AWS Cognito | No vendor lock-in for the primary IdP; Cognito is fallback only. |
| Workflow / orchestration | Temporal | AWS Step Functions | Saga + retries + visibility for the reconciliation engine. |
| Container platform | Kubernetes (EKS) · Helm · ArgoCD | ECS Fargate | Standard delivery model; Fargate stays as a low-cost fallback. |
| IaC | Terraform + Terragrunt | Pulumi | Hiring depth, mature module ecosystem. |
| CI/CD | GitHub Actions → ArgoCD | GitLab CI | Pull-based deploys; rollback is a Git revert. |
| Observability | OpenTelemetry · Grafana · Loki · Tempo · Prometheus | Datadog (commercial) | Vendor-portable telemetry; Datadog acceptable if budget permits. |
| Security | Snyk · Trivy · Vault · Cloudflare WAF · OPA | — | Defence-in-depth across code, image, runtime and policy. |
| Test & QA | Playwright · Jest · Pytest · k6 · Detox (mobile) | — | End-to-end coverage on web, API, load and mobile. |
| Cloud provider | AWS (eu-/ap- region, tenant-pinned) | Azure secondary, DR-only | Skill availability, breadth of managed data services. |
dev, staging (prod-like), prod. No more.Risk register maintained by the Tech Lead, reviewed every sprint review and every steering committee. Severity reflects residual risk after mitigation.
| ID | Risk | Severity | Phase | Mitigation | Owner / trigger |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| R-01 | Three-person team is single point of failure for any single workstream. | HIGH | All | Designated back-up per workstream; pairing rota; documented runbooks; fractional bench on call. | PM / weekly capacity check |
| R-02 | Compliance scope creep (PCI / data residency) discovered late in Phase III. | HIGH | P1P3 | Compliance officer engaged in S0; tokenisation at the edge from S2; Phase I pen-test & audit. | BE / quarterly audit |
| R-03 | LLM provider price & latency volatility breaks AI agent unit economics. | MED | P2 | Provider-agnostic gateway; response cache; budget-per-tenant ceilings; self-hosted fallback path. | BE / monthly cost review |
| R-04 | Payment gateway integration blocked by vendor onboarding timeline. | MED | P3 | Begin PSP commercial conversations at end of Phase I; have second PSP as parallel option. | PM / Sprint 8 gate |
| R-05 | Mobile app store review delays Phase I GA. | MED | P1 | Submit a TestFlight + internal-track build at S6; production submission in S7 with two-week buffer. | MO / S6 submission |
| R-06 | Data quality from terminals (missing fields, clock skew, duplicate IDs). | MED | P1 | Schema validation at ingest; idempotency keys; dead-letter queue with operator triage UI. | BE / continuous monitoring |
| R-07 | AI hallucination causes incorrect financial advice to a customer. | HIGH | P2 | RAG over governed sources only; output evaluation harness; advisory disclaimer in UX; human-in-the-loop for financial actions. | BE / pre-GA eval |
| R-08 | Scope inflation during steering committee reviews pulls dates left. | MED | All | Change-request log with explicit scope/cost/date impact; default answer is "next phase". | PM / each SteerCo |
| R-09 | Cloud bill overruns from poorly bounded analytics queries. | MED | P1P2 | Query cost budgets; per-tenant rate limits; weekly FinOps review during the first two phases. | BE / weekly FinOps |
| R-10 | Reconciliation engine in Phase III surfaces historical data discrepancies. | MED | P3 | Shadow mode for two sprints before cutover; explainable variance reports; remediation backlog. | BE + QA / S17 |
| R-11 | Knowledge concentration in the Tech Lead role. | MED | All | Architecture Decision Records in-repo; pairing rota; quarterly bus-factor audit. | PM / quarterly |
| R-12 | Steering decisions delayed beyond four-week SLA cause sprint thrash. | LOW | All | Default-forward decision protocol: silence past SLA = proceed; logged in minutes. | PM / SteerCo charter |
Three production go-lives in 36 weeks, each preceded by a 1-week UAT, a 1-week hardening window, and followed by a 2-week hypercare period. Cutovers are blue/green; rollbacks are a Git revert away.
| Phase | Go-live date (rel.) | Pre-cutover gate | Cutover plan | Hypercare exit criteria |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| I | End of W16 | Pen-test clean; perf soak passed; UAT sign-off; runbook approved. | Blue/green; mobile released to stores 7 days prior under feature flag; portal cut over via DNS. | ≤2 Sev-2/week for 14 days; zero Sev-1; on-call rotation stable. |
| II | End of W26 | AI eval harness passes thresholds; PII redaction audited; cost ceilings enforced. | Gradual rollout via feature flag — 5 → 25 → 100% of tenants over 7 days. | Hallucination rate < baseline; cost per session within budget; CSAT non-regressive. |
| III | End of W36 | PSP certification; KYC vendor live; reconciliation shadow-mode deltas accepted. | Per-module rollout: payments → onboarding → loan → utilities → loyalty over 10 days. | Reconciliation closes daily with <0.1% unexplained variance; PSP success rate ≥ 99%. |
The architecture is intentionally over-built in exactly three places: the event spine, the model gateway and the marketplace adapter contract. These are the seams along which Paymetryx is expected to scale post-engagement — into multi-region operation, into a published partner SDK, and into a fully transactional fintech marketplace. None of the post-engagement options require a rewrite of services delivered in Phases I — III; they are configuration, additional services, and commercial agreements.
The team finishes the 36 weeks with a platform that is operationally boring — and that is the highest praise an enterprise build can earn.