A new entrant with no legacy — and no software
Straumur is an Icelandic payment facilitator, part of the Kvika group ecosystem, serving merchants across in-person and e-commerce payments. It partners with Adyen, which acts as the card acquiring bank behind its operations.
Being new meant no legacy systems to fight. It also meant no systems at all: everything a payment company needs in order to exist had to be written. Moberg was engaged to build that platform end to end — the systems that take a merchant from signup to settled money, and the portals through which merchants, partners and Straumur's own staff run the business day to day. Kick-off was September 2022. The first live transaction ran in April 2023.
The whole chain, from onboarding to settlement
The platform covers the full merchant lifecycle: onboarding, transaction processing and settlement, with separate portals for merchants, partners and administrators. On top of that sit public APIs, a hosted checkout and a Shopify plugin, so a webshop can accept payments without touching the APIs directly. Integrations follow hosted-checkout and webhook patterns, so merchants are told what happened rather than having to poll for it.
Payment infrastructure has a particular property: it is payment-grade or it is nothing. There is no minimum viable settlement. The architecture was treated as production financial infrastructure from the first commit — which is less a slogan than a description of how the test suites and the reconciliation logic were prioritised.
A second engagement added the reporting layer: a Power BI implementation covering transaction volumes, processing times and payment trends, automated financial reconciliation, fraud-detection and compliance reporting, and merchant performance and fee analysis. The operations team now reads the same numbers finance reconciles against.
The honest part
Money must reconcile
Correctness
Every transaction ends in somebody's settlement. A rounding bug in an ordinary product is a ticket; here it is a discrepancy in a merchant's payout. Reconciliation had to be automated and boring, on purpose.
Seven months to live money
Timeline
Kick-off to first transaction in roughly seven months meant building onboarding, processing and settlement in parallel rather than in sequence — and doing it without lowering the bar that payment infrastructure has to clear.
Many front doors
Surface area
Merchant, partner and admin portals, public APIs, a hosted checkout and a Shopify plugin all sit on the same core. Each new surface is another way to be wrong, so the contracts between them had to hold.
What it bought Straumur
Straumur went from a project kick-off to processing real payments in about seven months, and the platform then carried more than 50 million transactions in its first eighteen. Launch day is the easiest day; the next ten years are the product. The same platform, portals and integration surfaces that got Straumur live are the ones it now grows on.
The reporting layer turned the transaction stream into something the business can steer by: volumes and processing times for operations, reconciliation and compliance for finance, merchant performance and fee analysis for the commercial team. Fewer spreadsheets, one set of numbers.
Team
- —Domagoj Medo
- —Kristijan Kraupner
- —Jure Perak
- —Luka Soldo
- —Matej Škoro
- —Neven Marić
- —Domagoj Draženović
- —Matija Alilović
- —Velimir Pavić
- —Bruno Cerovac
Key objectives
Build everything a payment company needs to exist — onboarding, processing, settlement — from an empty repository.
Reach live money fast, without letting speed erode the payment-grade bar.
Give merchants, partners and Straumur's own staff each a portal to run the business from.
Make integration easy enough that a webshop can take payments without touching an API.
Turn the transaction stream into numbers operations, finance and the commercial team can steer by.
Services
- —Backend development
- —Frontend development
- —API development
- —Software architecture
- —Payments integration
- —Business intelligence
Technology
Numbers
~7mo
Kick-off to first live transaction
50M+
Transactions in the first 18 months
2,000
Icelandic merchants
Day 1
Payment-grade infrastructure, from the first commit
