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Tessen
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Company

Founded to make month end boring.

Tessen started in 2019 with two people who had spent years closing books and were tired of two systems disagreeing about the same Tuesday. The ledger came first. The company grew around it.

Amsterdam · Singapore Eleven people Founded 2019 Reviewed Q1
How we work

The company is small on purpose.

Eleven people run a payment ledger for regulated operators. We plan to stay near that number. Fewer hands on the write path means fewer ways for a record to be wrong.

Background

Both founders came out of finance operations. Neither had built a payment system before. The first version of Tessen was a reconciliation script that ran nightly against a processor that would not explain its own settlement file. It saved four days a month. That was the whole product for eighteen months.

What changed is the order of things. Most platforms move the money and write the record afterwards, which is why the record is always slightly behind the money. Tessen writes the entry first and moves the money against it. Everything else on this site follows from that one choice.

The company has stayed the size that fits around a single write path. Growth shows up as more entities and more regions on the same ledger, not as more teams with their own copy of the truth.

Founded
2019, Amsterdam
Entities
Two — NL and SG
People
11
Regions
EU, US, APAC
Audited
Annually since 2021
Ownership
Founder-held
Two legal entities drawn as plates, connected to three regional ledgers by straight lines.

Standing rules

We do not hold money we cannot explain.

A held balance names the rule that held it and the date it releases. If we cannot name both, the hold does not happen and the payout goes out on schedule.

We do not ship a control without the drill that tests it.

A restore plan nobody has run is a document. The quarterly drill is what turns it into a control, and the timing is published whether or not the quarter went well.

We do not revise a price after signature.

Implementation is quoted once, before the contract. Scheme and interchange costs pass through at cost with the breakdown attached to each settlement.

History

How the ledger got here.

Eight entries, in the order they happened. Two of them were bad years, and they are still on the list.

  1. Company

    Two people and a nightly script

    The first version reconciled one processor's settlement file against a spreadsheet. It ran at three in the morning and emailed a difference. Nobody paid for it.

  2. Product

    First settlement in production

    One merchant, one currency, one bank. The ledger wrote the entry before the payout left, which is the only decision from that year still standing.

  3. Assurance

    First independent audit

    A twelve-month observation window, four findings, all closed. The report is the reason the second and third customers signed.

  4. Product

    Records stopped crossing borders

    Region became a choice made once, at account creation, and permanent afterwards. Backups followed the choice. This took most of the year and shipped late.

  5. Company

    Outside capital, once

    One round, one investor, no board seat given up. It paid for the second region and the on-call rota. Nothing else about the company changed.

  6. Product

    Treasury and multiple entities

    Groups with more than one legal entity stopped needing an instance each. Sweeps and holds became configuration, so changing one is a review instead of a release.

  7. Company

    Singapore, and a bad first quarter

    APAC opened with two people and the same runbook. The first quarter missed its support targets because the rota was written for one time zone. It is written for two now.

  8. Today

    Where this stands

    Eleven people, two entities, three regions. The five posts below are the whole hiring plan; there is no second one behind it.

Team

Who owns what.

Six roles carry a decision each. When something breaks, the name on the incident note is one of these, and you know which one before you write in.

Team member

Head of risk

What a decline means before it reaches you. Owns the reason-code map and the retry rule for every scheme.

Team member

Head of engineering

The write path. Every change to how an entry is recorded goes through one review, and this is who runs it.

Team member

Reconciliation lead

The match rules and their tolerances. Decides what counts as a break and who it goes to when it is one.

Team member

Treasury lead

Balances, holds and sweeps. Signs off on any payout rule that can move money between entities.

Team member

Compliance officer

The processor register, the sub-processor list and the audit calendar. Also the person who says no to a region.

Team member

Support lead

The rota. On Enterprise this is who assigns the engineer whose name you get before the first incident.

Careers

Hiring for the parts that break first.

Five posts, each replacing something a person currently does by hand. The description says which one, because that is the actual job.

Reconciliation engineer Engineering Amsterdam or remote in EU Full time Settlement operations analyst Operations Amsterdam Full time Compliance analyst Compliance Amsterdam or Singapore Full time Backend engineer, ledger Engineering Remote in EU Full time Support engineer, APAC hours Support Singapore Full time
Apply

One form, one reply.

We read everything inside a week and answer either way, including the ones we pass on. If none of the five fits, say so in the last field and tell us what you would rather own.

No recruiters, no take-home test. A reply either way inside a week.