Formance

I'll be in Paris next week for Paris Blockchain Week - Wednesday 15 and Thursday 16. If you're there and want to connect, drop me a message.

Most teams think payment tracking is a logging problem. It is a ledger problem. A single cross-border payment typically touches four independent systems. A bank for fiat in, a custody provider for stablecoins, an exchange for FX, and a local bank for payout. None share a transaction ID. None understand the full lifecycle This creates a structural blind spot. At low volume, teams manually reconcile. At scale, this breaks. The US–Mexico corridor alone processes over $5B per month. At 1,000 transactions per day, you are no longer tracking payments. You are running forensic accounting in production  ____ The failure shows up in specific places. -> First, compliance. A payment gets paused mid-flow. You cannot answer whether funds are in custody, in review, or already converted. Each system shows a different state. No system shows the truth. -> Second, failed payouts. A wrong account number leaves funds stranded in local currency. Without per-transaction state tracking, you do not know if the money sits in a bank, an exchange, or a holding account. Support becomes investigation. -> Third, FX leakage. You quote a rate at 16.80. Execution happens at 17.05 or 17.20. Without linking quote and execution per transaction, you cannot measure spread, slippage, or actual revenue. Margin disappears silently. -> Fourth, reconciliation. Bank balances, custody balances, and exchange reports should match. They do not. Teams spend days aligning X, Y, and Z across systems, often without a definitive answer. The core issue is that each system records events, not outcomes. The fix is not more integrations but a single timeline. A proper ledger creates one atomic record of the payment lifecycle. The same transaction tracks USD in, USDC movement, FX conversion, and MXN payout. Every step is linked through a single identifier, and every state transition is explicit. That unlocks concrete use cases. You can answer “where is the money” with one query, not four systems. You can measure FX revenue and slippage per transaction, not per month. You can prove to regulators exactly when compliance held and released funds. You can resolve failed payouts instantly by locating funds in holding states. The shift is clear. Moving money is solved, but we still have not solved how to record it. The system that wins is the one that turns fragmented events into a single, auditable narrative. Insights by Formance

Had the chance to speak at Columbia Business School last week to a great audience of MBA students. We talked about my journey from Alsid to Formance, building and scaling tech companies as a non-technical founder, open source as a go-to-market strategy, fundraising, and where fintech is heading. The fun and the less fun parts. Thanks Noa Barzelay, Cindy Morand, and Andrew Oestreicher for having me!

On-chain confirmation answers one question: has the blockchain recorded this transfer as immutable? It says nothing about whether the funds are available, whether the issuer will permit their movement, or whether the fiat backing them has actually settled. Stablecoin finality unfolds across three distinct layers—blockchain, issuer, and fiat—each governed by a different authority, each with its own failure modes. A system that treats confirmation as settlement has collapsed three separate risk profiles into one implicit assumption. That assumption holds until it doesn't. We wrote about how to model finality correctly: as a set of conditions that resolve over time, each gating different product actions. What makes a system operationally reliable is keeping what happened in the ledger separate from what the user can actually do with their balance.

We’re at Fintech Meetup in Las Vegas with Finn! Lots of great conversations already: embedded banking and lending, B2B payments, stablecoin products for banks and credit unions, hybrid fiat/crypto financial flows and ledger software infrastructure of course! DM me if you’re around and have time to meet! #FintechMeetup

Antoine Moreau and Finn Mabie will be at Fintech Meetup in Las Vegas this week > say hi if you're around!

Today we’re announcing a strategic partnership with Tink, a European leader in Open Banking and a Visa solution provider. This new connector allows you to securely connect to your bank transaction data, allowing for the automation of bank reconciliation processes. Leveraging Tink’s extensive and robust network of banking connections, Formance gains real-time, unified access to professional bank account transaction data. The Tink Connector is available to Formance customers connecting to banks in France, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland, and Portugal, with a broader rollout across Europe planned at a later stage. It is available immediately to Formance customers globally.