Ashutosh Pal

Money at the Speed of Trust

Abstract:

"Peer-to-peer (P2P) money movement is now one of the highest-velocity software domains in the world. In the United States alone, multiple mobile-wallet rails carry tens of billions of dollars annually, every transaction must clear in under a second, and every line of code that touches the flow falls under at least one regulatory regime (PCI DSS, BSA/AML, KYC/CIP, SOX). Building infrastructure for this domain at internet scale, with reliability targets above 99.9% and zero tolerance for cardholder-data leakage, is a problem the research community discusses far less than its consumer impact deserves.
In this keynote, Ashutosh Pal — Lead Software Engineer at Green Dot Corporation and the architect of the cloud-native infrastructure that powers Samsung Wallet “Tap to Transfer,” a U.S. peer-to-peer payments product launched in 2025 to approximately twelve million Samsung Wallet users in partnership with Visa — presents an architectural and algorithmic anatomy of building intelligent, fault-tolerant payments systems at national scale. Drawing on nineteen years of design and delivery experience across Fiserv core banking, Wells Fargo Zelle, and Green Dot’s Banking-as-a-Service platform (publicly launched as Arc by Green Dot in October 2024), the talk presents reusable algorithmic patterns for three frontier problems: (i) idempotent, velocity-aware replay of distributed money-movement transactions across heterogeneous wallets and processors; (ii) cross-protocol active/standby failover that preserves zero transaction loss across REST and ISO 8583 rails; and (iii) zero-downtime migration of partner traffic between legacy and modern platforms using shadow-compare verification.
The talk closes with a practitioner-grounded view of how AI-assisted engineering tools — GitHub Copilot, Anthropic Claude, and similar LLM-based coding assistants — are reshaping productivity in regulated financial-services codebases, the new classes of risk they introduce in cardholder-data and money-movement codepaths, and a set of architectural principles for governing them safely. The audience will leave with concrete patterns they can apply to their own work in cloud-native systems, regulated software, and intelligent algorithmic infrastructure — and with a vivid sense of what it takes to ship payments software to millions of consumers in 2026"

Profile:

Ashutosh Pal is a Lead Software Engineer and Technical Manager at Green Dot Corporation (NYSE: GDOT) in Austin, Texas, with more than 20 years of experience building high-scale software for the banking, fintech, and payments industries. He architected the cloud-native, fault-tolerant infrastructure behind Samsung Wallet’s “Tap to Transfer” peer-to-peer payments product — launched in the U.S. in 2025 through Green Dot’s partnership with Samsung, and deployed to approximately 12 million Samsung Wallet users — and is a core contributor to Arc by Green Dot, Green Dot’s embedded-finance platform that powers Apple Cash, Walmart MoneyCard, and Uber driver payouts. Prior roles include senior engineering and technical-leadership positions at Fiserv (10 years) in core banking.