Our client an investor-backed greenfield European electronic money institution, currently applying for its licence with Latvijas Banka. They are building business banking for merchants, with online gaming operators as their lead segment.

Our client's sponsor bank relationship is expected to run through BluOr Bank in Latvia. The product is deliberately narrow to begin with: pay-ins and pay-outs, virtual IBANs, and virtual debit cards, with multi-currency accounts and FX. Our customers are companies rather than consumers, so the platform has to support corporate structures, approval mandates, and high-volume outbound payment runs.

They are selecting the core banking platform they will run on. The ledger is the part of that decision they cannot easily reverse, and it is the part where a mistake is most expensive.

Our client wants an experienced practitioner to tell us, based on evidence, which of these general ledgers we should build on. The vendors currently in scope are SDK.finance, Skaleet, Tuum, Advapay (Macrobank), Thought Machine (Vault Core), and Mambu. Desk research, a 130-question vendor questionnaire, and vendor meetings are already complete; you will not be starting from a blank page.

Key Activities

• A use-case set. Roughly fifty use cases covering what an EMI's general ledger must actually do—the test suite we will hold every vendor to, and which we expect to reuse for acceptance testing at implementation.
• A documented assessment. Read each vendor's specifications, technical documentation, and questionnaire responses, and score them against those use cases. Some vendors publish extensive documentation; others publish almost none, and the difference matters.
• Vendor workshops. Prepare and lead an in-depth technical session with each shortlisted vendor. You will be the counterweight to their solution architect—the person in the room who knows what a good answer sounds like.
• A written recommendation. Which ledger we should take, why, what we are accepting by taking it, and what has to be closed before signature.
• Implementation delivery, commercial negotiation, and the merchant-facing portal—the client will ask for your read on the portal where it touches the ledger, but it is not the focus of this engagement.

The questions the client expects you to have opinions about:

• Whether a ledger is genuinely double-entry, immutable, and append-only—and whether corrections are made by reversal or by editing and deleting posted entries.
• The difference between a general ledger and a sub-ledger that feeds someone else's accounting system, and what that difference costs us.
• Chart-of-accounts design for an EMI: separating client money from our own funds, and the account structure a supervisor will expect to see.
• Safeguarding accounting—the daily reconciliation between customer liabilities and the safeguarded balance, and the evidence pack behind it.
• Multi-currency: a currency dimension against separate ledgers per currency, how FX legs are booked, and how revaluation works.
• Value date against booking date, backdating, period close, and what an operational-day cut-off does to a business that pays out on a Saturday night.
• Idempotency and concurrency—how a platform prevents double-spend on simultaneous debits, and how you would test that rather than take it on trust.
• Nostro and vostro handling, and reconciliation against a sponsor bank's statements.
• What comes out of the box for regulatory and statutory reporting, and what has to be built.

Your Background

Essential

• Senior, and recently hands-on. This is a high-consequence decision, and we want someone who has done this work themselves within roughly the last two years—not someone advising from memory.
• Direct experience of at least one double-entry core banking ledger. For example, Mambu, Thought Machine Vault, Tuum, Temenos, Finastra, 10x, or a bank's or EMI's own general ledger. We care that you have lived with one, not that you have read about several.
• EMI or payment institution experience is a strong advantage. If you have been through safeguarding, client money segregation, and a regulator's questions on them, say so prominently.
• Able to write and to run a room. The use cases have to be clear enough for a vendor to answer against, and the workshops have to be led rather than attended.

(Note: Please ensure your resume covers: which double-entry ledger you have worked with hands-on and when; whether you have worked inside an EMI or payment institution; and one example of a ledger decision or design you owned.)

Duration: Four to six weeks

Commitment: Part-time

Location: Fully remote, with meaningful overlap with Central European Time for vendor workshops.