How Yousend shipped cross-border payments with Blnk

When Michael Adeyeri began researching ledgers for Yousend, the remittance product was still an idea. He was working out how it would hold customer balances, convert currencies, apply fees, and track money from deposit to payout.

Yousend was being built for the African diaspora in Canada and the UK, with transfer corridors into Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, and Benin. Its ledger would need to record balances and transactions in CAD, GBP, NGN, and KES while keeping each movement traceable across deposit and payout providers.

The central technical problem was currency exchange. Yousend needed to explain what happened during every conversion, track realised and unrealised gains, and close its books accurately at the end of each day.

Mapping the money flow

Michael had been researching ledger systems for some time. He asked questions in developer communities and eventually contacted Blnk with a clear view of the product Yousend wanted to build.

Yousend started with its money map. Working with Blnk Finance, the team identified each point at which money entered, moved through, or left the product. Deposits, currency conversions, fees, payouts, limits, and pending transfers each needed a defined place in the financial record.

That map became the foundation of Yousend’s ledger design. Every conversion and fee needed to remain traceable, every customer needed a clear balance history, and operations needed to work from the same records as engineering.

Michael led the project internally. He learned how Blnk’s ledger model worked, then brought the wider engineering team into the implementation so they could build the product’s money movement workflows from the same design.

Choosing their preferred Open-source ledger

Yousend considered different ledger options as Michael researched how to turn the product’s money map into a production system. The team needed more than double-entry accounting. Its engineers wanted to inspect the system, test their transaction flows, and understand how the ledger worked before committing to it.

Blnk Core’s open-source model gave Yousend that control. The team could deploy the ledger, map its multi-currency flows, and validate its balance and reconciliation model directly against the system.

After testing how the options handled its balance model, currency exchange requirements, and deployment preferences, Yousend selected Blnk.

Building the FX and remittance workflows

Once the ledger design was clear, Yousend’s engineers built the product’s money movement workflows around it. The team implemented currency exchange and recorded the entries behind each conversion, giving it the financial history required to calculate realised and unrealised FX gains.

Those records also gave Yousend a consistent way to close its books at the end of each day. Instead of reconstructing its position from disconnected records, the team could work from the balances, conversions, fees, and payouts already recorded in the ledger.

Every feature involving money movement followed the same ledger design. Yousend built transaction limits around customer balances, allowing the team to set, update, and reset limits by account type. For transfers that had started but were not yet complete, Yousend used inflight transactions to manage the financial state until the transfer could be committed or voided.

For customer and operational reporting, Yousend uses balance snapshots and historical balances to extract account statements and inspect how a balance changed over time. When operations or compliance needs to investigate a transfer, the team can trace the original transaction through the balances it affected.

Operating a four-currency remittance ledger

Yousend went from an early product idea to a live remittance platform with its financial workflows built around one ledger. Currency exchange, fees, customer limits, pending transfers, FX gains, account statements, and end-of-day close all work from the same financial history.

Today, Yousend operates its Canada–Africa and UK–Africa remittance corridors on a financial core that supports four currencies. Its engineers self-host Blnk Core, while its operations team uses Blnk Cloud to inspect transactions, collaborate on investigations, and run back-office workflows from the same ledger.