Motive Partners is a specialist private equity firm focused on technology-enabled financial services. Their portfolio company's platform was being prepared for sale to NCR at the same time as onboarding the National Bank of Scotland as its first client. We helped re-architect the platform to meet both challenges head-on.
The Challenge
The team faced twin pressures that would test any platform: make the system robust and understandable enough to withstand acquisition due diligence, while simultaneously supporting new client requirements — including Plaid integration — without destabilising existing functionality.
There was no room for brittle integrations or opaque flows. The architecture needed to be clean enough for acquirers to understand and confident enough to onboard a major banking client. This required a fundamental shift in how the platform was structured.
Our Approach
We introduced an event-driven architecture that fundamentally changed how the platform handled critical flows. Rather than tightly-coupled services passing data directly, we built a message-driven backbone that made each operation traceable, testable, and resilient.
What We Delivered
- Message-driven architecture reducing coupling between services
- Dedicated microservices for webhook handling, auth callbacks, and payment integrations
- Cleaner data schema and type-safe data access patterns
- Improved CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure management
Each service now had clear, documented interfaces, allowing both internal teams and external auditors to understand exactly what the platform does and how.
How We Built It
We transitioned the platform to an event-driven microservices architecture, which is the gold standard for modern financial systems. By implementing a robust messaging backbone, we ensured that critical operations—like payments and onboarding—are processed asynchronously, reliably, and with a complete audit trail.
To support rapid integration with banking partners, we built dedicated gateway services that handle the complexity of secure third-party communication (such as Open Banking APIs). These services act as “adapters,” allowing the core platform to remain clean and stable while connecting to a changing external ecosystem.
Underpinning this is a rigorous Infrastructure-as-Code approach. Every environment is reproducible, compliant, and secure by design, providing the operational maturity that acquirers and Tier-1 banks demand.
The Results
With the new architecture in place, Motive's portfolio company was positioned for both acquisition success and client growth.
Outcomes
- Platform architecture cleaner and easier to reason about during acquisition due diligence
- Reduced risk when onboarding the National Bank of Scotland as first major client
- Foundation set for faster partner integrations going forward
- Comprehensive test coverage providing confidence in system reliability
- Documented APIs enabling clearer communication with acquirers and partners
Why It Matters
In FinTech, architecture is part of the product. Stratatech helped Motive turn a promising platform into something that could scale to more clients and pass the scrutiny of a large acquirer. When the stakes are this high — acquisition timelines and banking client expectations — there's no room for technical debt to slow you down.