Formance

Formance is an open-source developer platform for building and operating complex financial flows. It functions as a set of micro-services and libraries designed to manage internal financial transactions and integrate with various payment providers. The software is deployed as a server-side application, typically hosted on a Kubernetes cluster using official Helm charts, though it is also available as standalone binaries and Docker images for different environments.

Users interact with the platform through a dedicated command line interface for stack deployment and transaction management, alongside a control dashboard for monitoring operations. The system is designed for developers and architects who need a provider-agnostic layer to handle money movements without being locked into a single proprietary payment gateway. It allows for the creation of custom financial logic that remains independent of the underlying payment processing hardware or software.

Key features

• Double-entry immutable ledger for recording internal financial transactions
• Unified API and data layer for payment processing
• Numscript DSL and virtual machine for monetary computation modeling
• Support for multi-currency transactions and money movements
• Asynchronous cross-service communication via Kafka or NATS
• PostgreSQL backend for persistent financial data storage
• HTTP gateway management through Traefik
• CLI tool for stack creation and ledger interactions

The architecture relies on a modular stack where components such as the Formance Ledger and Formance Payments services can be used together as a full suite or as independent micro-services. It utilizes a monorepo structure to provide a common infrastructure layer across its versioned services. By combining a programmable ledger with a specific domain language for monetary computations, the platform enables the precise modeling of financial rules and transaction flows. This makes it suitable for organizations building fintech infrastructure that requires a verifiable and immutable source of truth for every single money movement.

Formance is a developer-centric financial infrastructure layer for building custom, agnostic money flows.