How we engage
Senior-led, embedded, and built to be handed over. This page is what your procurement, engineering, and compliance leads will want to know before we start.
The team model
We don't staff-augment and we don't disappear into a black box. A Cross Border Wires engagement puts a small senior team inside yours:
- Principal architect — owns the architecture, the abstraction boundaries, the network relationships, and the phase gates. The person in your design reviews is the person in your Slack.
- Senior payments engineers — build the ISO 20022 layer, the adapters, and the orchestration alongside your engineers, in your repos, to your standards.
- QA and test engineering via Pinpoint — our testing partner runs automated regression, end-to-end rail testing across sandboxes, load and chaos testing, and certification test evidence.
- Your people — an integration lead, one or two engineers who will own the system, and a compliance contact. Knowledge transfers continuously, not at the end.
Typical load is three to four people from our side in the build phases, tapering to two through go-live and hypercare.
The program
Every full build runs the same four phases, with one track in parallel. Timelines flex with scope and network lead times; the shape doesn't.
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Core & adapters
ISO 20022 schema registry, message builder with field-level validation, bidirectional parser with network business rules; RTP, FedWire, ACH (and FedNow) adapters; joint architecture and boundary design with your team; sandbox access applications filed in week one — they're on the critical path.
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Orchestration & sandbox
Routing engine (rail selection by amount, speed, and network health), automated failover with idempotency-safe retry, webhook and reconciliation design, and end-to-end transactions across every rail in the official network sandboxes.
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QA & hardening
Full unit and automated regression suites, load testing to production throughput and latency targets, security review — encryption, key management and HSM readiness, audit-trail immutability — and the production runbook.
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Production & hypercare
Formal network certification, credential cutover, a staged canary ramp with rollback, on-call through stabilization, and the handover: runbooks, playbooks, and engineering training signed off by your team.
Parallel — compliance integration. From week one, not phase three: BSA/AML and OFAC touchpoints, audit-trail design, examiner-ready documentation, and a weekly sync with your compliance lead so nothing surfaces late.
Ownership boundaries
Clean lanes are how regulated work stays safe. Stated up front, in the contract:
| You own | The customer relationship, the regulatory narrative, sanctions and AML screening decisions, and the data. |
|---|---|
| Your sponsor bank or network owns | Settlement, network membership, and the rules of the rail. |
| We own | The integration: the ISO 20022 layer, the adapters, routing and failover, the audit trails and evidence that make your controls demonstrable, and the certification work to get it live. |
| We never | Perform sanctions screening or make compliance decisions on your behalf. We build the infrastructure that makes yours provable. |
Knowledge transfer and exit
Every engagement ends with your engineers running the system: runbooks and incident playbooks handed over, training sessions completed and signed off, and no ongoing dependency on us unless you choose an advisory retainer. You own everything — code, documentation, and network relationships.
How we start
Most engagements begin with the Rail Integration Assessment — one to two weeks, fixed fee — which produces the architecture and the roadmap the build runs on. If you already know what you're building, we can scope a build or a certification engagement directly.
Contracting and procurement
| Contracting entity | CTO on Demand, Inc., Phoenix, Arizona. Cross Border Wires is its payments practice. |
|---|---|
| Agreements | MSA plus SOW per phase, or a fixed-scope agreement for assessments and certification work. Milestone-based invoicing for builds. |
| Confidentiality | NDA-ready; we work under your NDA or ours. |
| Insurance | Professional liability (E&O) and general liability in force; certificates on request. |
| Security | Background-checked senior staff; least-privilege access to your environments; your secrets stay in your secrets manager — we don't hold production credentials outside your controls. |
| Location | US-based team, Phoenix; on-site for design sessions and go-live as needed. |
Questions from procurement: morgan.reed@ctoondemandinc.com
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.