Magic — Payments Without Cards
For a production payments platform for e-commerce merchants.
Bank-to-bank transfers in place of card processing, with customer rewards funded by the interchange savings.
The Challenge
Card interchange is a tax on every e-commerce transaction. For a merchant doing $10M/year, Visa and Mastercard fees alone consume $200K–$300K in margin — money that goes to networks and issuers, not the business. The alternative — ACH and open-banking transfers — has existed for years. But adoption is blocked by three real engineering problems, not marketing ones:
- Bank-account-based payments are slow and unfamiliar to consumers. Without strong UX, conversion collapses at checkout.
- Settlement is asynchronous and reversible. A bank transfer that "completes" on day one can fail on day three. Most engineering teams underestimate this.
- Integration cost is high. Merchants will not rebuild their checkout. A payments platform has to drop into existing storefronts the way Stripe does — or it loses before it starts.
- Our engagement: build the full platform end-to-end. Backend, infrastructure, merchant-facing SDK, and the embedded checkout experience.
Project Details
Our Solution
We built Magic, a drop-in bank-to-bank payment platform for e-commerce merchants that eliminates heavy card processing fees while providing a seamless customer checkout experience. Customers can securely authenticate their bank accounts through a hosted payment flow, allowing funds to move directly bank-to-bank. Merchants benefit from significantly reduced transaction costs and can redirect those savings into customer rewards such as cashback, tokens, and store credits to encourage adoption of direct payments over traditional card networks.
Merchant Integration & Hosted Checkout
Designed and developed a lightweight TypeScript SDK distributed through npm, allowing merchants to integrate Magic directly into existing Shopify, WooCommerce, React, or Vue storefronts with minimal implementation effort. Built a secure hosted checkout flow that handled bank authentication, account linking, amount confirmation, and rewards display entirely within Magic’s controlled environment, ensuring merchants never handled sensitive banking credentials while maintaining a seamless user experience.
Transaction Engine & Reconciliation Architecture
Engineered a robust event-driven transaction system capable of handling asynchronous ACH settlements, webhook retries, reversals, disputes, and delayed settlement confirmations. Implemented an append-only ledger architecture with explicit transaction state transitions, idempotency enforcement, reconciliation workflows, and immutable audit trails to ensure complete transaction traceability and prevent duplicate processing during retries or infrastructure failures.
Rewards System & Financial Operations
Built a separate but linked rewards ledger system to support cashback, tokens, and merchant incentives without compromising financial reconciliation accuracy. Integrated Plaid for secure bank authentication and Dwolla for ACH transfer orchestration while maintaining independent settlement and reward processing flows. Designed automated reward reversal and clawback mechanisms tied directly to transaction lifecycle events to preserve accounting consistency across refunds and failed settlements.
Infrastructure, Deployment & Operational Reliability
Deployed the platform using Django and PostgreSQL with a strong focus on operational reliability, observability, and compliance readiness. Implemented webhook signature verification, retry handling, dead-letter queues, audit logging, environment isolation between sandbox and production systems, and operator tooling for event replay and reconciliation workflows. Successfully launched the platform into production supporting live merchant transactions, bank linking, authorized transfers, rewards distribution, reconciliation, and refund processing at scale.
Visual Showcase
Screenshots and interfaces from the final product
The Results
Measurable impact within the first 6 months
Technologies & Tools
Related Projects
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