Portfolio

Payments with Ivan

Ivan Antonov — payments from strategy to working software

Background
  • Digital transformation at ING
  • Advisory to financial institutions at McKinsey
  • Agent engineering at Yuno

A payment analytics chatbot

What is it? A natural-language chatbot answering questions about transaction data. Merchant payment teams can ask questions and get answers in seconds, without the need to rely on other teams

What problem it solves? Payment teams get real-time visibility on provider outages, costs and approval rates, as well as recommendations on actions to take – something that required a few days of analysis before

How it works? A synthetic dataset with 100k transactions, reproducing the statistical patterns of a book at this scale. The chatbot runs an LLM query across the dataset. In a production setting, the chatbot can be connected to the company’s systems and data sources

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A payment routing simulator

What is it? A multi-archetype mock payment gateway modeling five processor archetypes – global-acquirer, regional-bank-processor, APM-specialist, cross-border-FX-specialist, and high-risk orchestrator – with realistic ISO 8583 decline codes, 3DS v2.2 flows, and HMAC-signed webhooks

What problem does it solve? Sandbox environments approve on magic cards; production behaves differently. Merchant integration teams cannot test routing logic against realistic declines until customers complain. The simulator returns what merchants actually see in production, so integrations ship correct the first time

How does it work? Python with FastAPI, a Postgres payment state machine, Redis idempotency cache, a Kafka event bus, and Celery webhook workers. Installable via pip install payment-routing-simulator, live API under /routing-simulator/api/, and wired into Case 01’s chatbot as a routing-recommendation tool

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I build and optimize payments for financial institutions, fintechs and merchant payment teams, from strategy to working software