Lithic builds in-house transaction monitoring with Retool
Ronnie Caspers, Product at Lithic, on using Retool for fintech ops
This is where Lithic stops being a generic card issuing API and becomes purpose built infrastructure for complex fintechs. Transaction monitoring is the system that checks every card swipe against bank, network, and internal rules before or after money moves. Lithic found that standard vendors were designed for one layer of customer activity, while its B2B2C model required linking a business customer and that business's end users in the same review workflow, so it moved this logic in house with Retool and its own data model.
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Lithic's broader positioning is modular and developer first, not all in one. Earlier, the company described transaction monitoring and KYC as areas where customers often want best of breed tools. The later shift to building monitoring internally shows this workflow had become too tied to Lithic's own product structure to stay outsourced.
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The hard part is not just flagging risky payments, it is representing messy real world relationships in software. Ronnie Caspers describes a stack that pulls data from Snowflake, Postgres, DynamoDB, APIs, Slack, and Zendesk into one operational tool. That matters because compliance teams need a full view of the business, the end customer, and the exact transaction in one place to review and act quickly.
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This sits on top of a broader market split. Point solutions like Unit21 are built as highly customizable decision layers for risk teams, and FIS argues larger embedded finance programs increasingly want enterprise grade compliance workflows and tighter bank level process control. Lithic's choice shows that even strong vendors can break when the workflow is both highly regulated and highly specific to one processor's funds flow.
Going forward, more embedded finance companies will make this same cut line. They will keep outsourcing standard checks like basic KYC, but bring transaction monitoring, case handling, and bank reporting closer to their own ledger and authorization stack. The winner in card infrastructure will be the one that can make those compliance workflows as configurable as the payments product itself.