OBJ. 2022-003
The ledger of a thousand shops
The payments house for merchants the world's gateways skip.
The world's big payment gateways quietly skip the Caribbean. A shop in Kingston that wants to take a card online finds the famous names simply don't serve it. Inkress was built for exactly those merchants — the payments house for the shops the world leaves out.
It moves real money for real island businesses: taking a card, checking that a customer is who they say, keeping a faithful ledger of every transaction. A whole quarter of tools has grown up around it — a booking book, a workshop board, a build list — but at its heart is one stubborn idea: a merchant here deserves the same plumbing as a merchant anywhere.
It has kept that ledger, day in and day out, for years.
What it does
- 01Card payments for island merchants the global gateways won't serve
- 02A faithful ledger of every transaction, kept for years
- 03A whole family of shop tools grown up around it
For the curious — the making of it
A multi-tenant commerce and payments platform: an Elixir/Phoenix money-movement core (~1,622 commits, 2022–2026) with a live TypeScript rewrite. A textbook risk split — a NestJS risk service publishes verdicts to Redis on the hot path, the core is the enforcement point.
- Caribbean payments depth: PowerTranz/FAC hosted 3-DS, NCB online-banking automation, and batch checks against Jamaica's Companies Office
- PDP/PEP architecture: risk, limits and KYC decided out-of-band, enforced in the core
- Fronted by the UnifySSL gateway; around forty repositories in the workspace