What we have actually built
Three Lock Box is a construction escrow and payment control platform for the US construction industry, built on ASP.NET Core with MongoDB. Owners, contractors, subcontractors, lenders and title companies each approve their part of a project, and every commitment and disbursement has one source of truth — which is the whole point in a sector where payment disputes are the norm.
EZRater is a comparative rating platform for surplus lines insurance. A broker enters three data elements and gets premium indications from more than forty carriers in about eight seconds, which required translating one submission into each carrier's own dialect of the ACORD standard. Its owner's product suite is used by close to five hundred MGA offices across all fifty states.
The questions we ask before writing code
Who holds the money, and at which moment does it change hands? What has to be provable afterwards, to whom, and for how long? Which third parties are in the path, and what is the product supposed to do when one of them is unavailable or slow?
Those answers decide the architecture far more than the framework does. A payment flow that cannot be reconciled, or an approval that cannot be evidenced, is a defect regardless of how well the screens test.
Where fintech projects usually go wrong
Treating the happy path as the product. Real money software spends most of its code on partial failures: a gateway that times out after taking the payment, a refund that arrives twice, a reconciliation that is off by one transaction nobody can find.
The second common failure is an audit trail added late. If who-approved-what is reconstructed from application logs rather than recorded as a first-class fact, the first serious dispute will show you the gap. We build that record from the start, because retrofitting it is close to a rewrite.
An honest note on scope
We build financial software. We are not a regulated entity, we do not hold client funds, and we do not give legal or compliance advice — your counsel and your regulator decide what you must do, and we build to that.
We have not built core banking or a lending origination system, and we will say so rather than imply otherwise. Our proven ground is payments and escrow flows, insurance rating and carrier integration, and the approval, reporting and integration work that surrounds both.
How an engagement starts
A short assessment: the flow of money, the parties and their permissions, the regulatory obligations you have been given, and the third parties you depend on. We also ask what happens today when something goes wrong, because that usually reveals the real requirement.
The output is a written scope and estimate with stages, costs and risks, based on our seven-stage delivery process, before any build starts.
