V-Sum Eight
Tuesday, September 28, 2021
Technical Briefings
Gil Akos & Sam Morgan
Gil Akos, co-founder and CEO of Astra, demos the Astra automation platform for money movement. Astra\'s thesis: ACH and AFP are fragile and archaic, but below the surface lies an iceberg of origination risk, returns, and entitlements that blocks fintechs from shipping money movement quickly. Astra wraps this complexity in a four-step integration: create a UserIntent, walk the user through a single OAuth 2.0 authorization screen (terms, SMS code, optional account linking, redirect), link bank accounts (managed Plaid, bring-your-own processor tokens, or manual account+routing), and create Routines — rule-driven automations like "when destination balance drops below $100, move $500 in." Routines run in the background, firing transfers automatically. The closing architecture segment contrasts origination (fintech → sponsor bank → one-way ACH debit) with Astra\'s orchestration model (fintech → Astra → debit source + credit sponsor bank) for higher settlement fidelity and faster speed, with the goal of enabling fintechs to eliminate origination risk and capture more recurring inbound deposits (typically ~$1,200 per user per month).
Jason Ioannides & Monica Murthy
Monica Murthy and Jason Ioannides of Alloy demo the Alloy identity decisioning platform — an "identity command center" financial institutions use to manage the customer lifecycle across fraud detection, KYC, AML, transaction monitoring, and (launching next month) credit underwriting. The briefing focuses on Alloy's onboarding product. At the core is the Alloy workflow — a visual no-code orchestration of 70+ third-party data sources (Iovation, LexisNexis, Socure, Ekata, ID Analytics, and more) that fan out from a single API call and return a consolidated approve/review/decline outcome. Compliance teams can edit rules in plain English (IF ID Analytics score ≥ 850 OR Socure Sigma Fraud ≥ 0.985), add entirely new data sources, and flip conditional-execution gates (skip KYC/AML on obvious frauds) — all from the UI, with version control, a change log, and role-based manual-review queues. Evaluation views expose every signal that fired and every raw data-source response for audit.
Rui Gomes & Julie Landrum
OpenNode is a Bitcoin infrastructure provider focused on Bitcoin payments and payouts. The thesis: Bitcoin is the internet-native currency — global, decentralized, borderless, low-cost, and instantly final via the Lightning Network — and that makes it a better rail for online payments than legacy schemes. OpenNode powers Bitcoin payments for McDonald's El Salvador locations, Substack creator subscriptions, and Bitcoin-native companies like Fold. The demo walks through the OpenNode merchant dashboard (on-chain vs Lightning requests, live QR payment, USD auto-conversion so merchants have no volatility risk), payment buttons and invoicing, split settlement that keeps a configurable percentage in Bitcoin and the rest in fiat, and the OpenNode API for generating charges and paying out Bitcoin or Lightning without ever holding the coins.