About
Cross Border Wires is the payments practice of CTO on Demand, Inc., a Phoenix-based technology leadership firm that has served more than thirty organizations across financial services, healthcare, and technology.
We formed the practice to do one thing well: the design and integration of US payment rails — RTP, FedNow, FedWire, ACH — and the ISO 20022 messaging that runs across them.
What you're paying for is scar tissue: the ISO 20022 validation failures, cutoff-time edge cases, return-code surprises, and certification detours that only show up when you've actually shipped a rail to production — and the judgment to route around them the second time.
Experience at
- American Express
- USAA
- Western Alliance Bank
- Foundations Investment Advisors
Where our team learned this work — inside regulated US payments and banking.
The team
Morgan K. Reed
Principal & CTO
Morgan leads the practice and every engagement's architecture. Payment application development at American Express, including the Plenti mobile payments platform; engineering delivered directly into regulated banking infrastructure at Western Alliance Bank; vendor API integrations inside compliance frameworks at USAA. As CTO at Foundations Investment Advisors, he led technology and compliance infrastructure across two financial firms managing over $5B in assets. He has worked directly with the Federal Reserve, The Clearing House, and Nacha on access, certification, and specifications, and holds a B.S. in Cybersecurity along with CSM and CSPO certifications. Founder of CTO on Demand, Inc.
Royce Carbowitz
Senior Payments Engineer
Royce builds the message layer and the adapters — ISO 20022 schema and validation, network-specific mapping, and the orchestration that routes between rails. He works embedded with client engineering teams through sandbox, certification, and go-live. Royce Carbowitz is a software architect with over a decade of experience in the payment industry, including stops at American Express, Figg, and Chase.
Roland Bou-Malham
Senior Integration Engineer
Roland leads integration delivery: provider and sponsor-bank connectivity, environment and credential management, reconciliation and webhook handling, and the production cutover. Roland Bou-Malham has been in the Fintech world for over five years, with emphasis on startups and international payment compliance.
QA and test engineering — Pinpoint
Our testing partner, Pinpoint, runs automated regression, end-to-end rail testing across network sandboxes, load and chaos testing, and the test evidence that certification and security reviews require. Pinpoint is engaged on every build phase, not bolted on at the end.
How engagements run
Senior-led and hands-on — the people on this page are the people in your architecture reviews and your Slack. We build alongside your team, transfer the knowledge as we go, and hand over the runbooks. You own everything, with no ongoing dependency.
The company
Cross Border Wires is a subsidiary of CTO on Demand, Inc. (Phoenix, Arizona), which is the contracting entity for all engagements. CTO on Demand provides fractional CTO, CIO, and CISO leadership; Cross Border Wires is where its payments work lives.
Start with the Rail Integration Assessment
Fixed scope, fixed fee, one to two weeks. An independent, senior-led read of your rails readiness and a sequenced integration roadmap you own — it de-risks the larger build before you commit to it. You're buying a roadmap, not hours.