ONPAY SOLUTIONS

OnPayConnect

Costs go down. Rebates come back. Accounts payable starts earning. 

It has moved $8B in total across a 75K vendor network the founders spent twelve years building. OnPay Solutions markets it at up to 80% lower costs.

An API-first payment platform that improves the lives of accounting departments everywhere.

At OnPayConnect, bringing on a new client meant weeks of custom integration work before they could move a single payment. We treated onboarding as an engineering job, so we kept pointing engineers at it, and those custom builds kept piling up. The backlog got heavy enough that even the customers we already had weren't getting the service they deserved.

The question I kept coming back to was whether onboarding a client needed to involve writing code at all. The bottleneck was never engineering capacity. It was that we were writing code to onboard customers. 

Going API first grew out of those conversations, a call we came to together, where a client integrates once against a stable contract instead of starting from scratch each time. We knew what it would cost. It was the slower path, it wouldn't pay off on the first client, and it meant committing to a contract we'd have to keep stable. 

I owned what that API needed to do for our vendors and why, and I set the contract with the lead engineer who built it. 

The other piece was a small process improvement team I'd built out of our IT support interns, cutting manual work across 9 functions by 5 to 90% and pulling the repetitive load off those same engineers.

The two together took the load off engineering, and that freed capacity was the real win. We spent it first on getting service back to the customers we had and bringing on a few legacy accounts. 

That work is what showed us the new customers who'd fit the API first path. 

Over seven months we added more than 20 new clients and grew subscription revenue 32%. It was compound, no single change did it. I left before the API first work was finished.