Example brief: Verity Payments

Verity Payments

veritypayments.com

Priya Raman, VP Product

Tuesday 11:00, 30 min · Intro call: portal rebuild

Also attending: Tomas Beck, Head of Engineering

Bottom line. Verity has outgrown a customer portal it built in 2021 and has said so in public. Priya owns the rebuild and has no front-end team to give it to. Lead with the takeover you ran for Kestrel, and find out who signs before the call ends.

Who they are

Series B, $28M, March 2026. Ardent Partners led it to fund a self-serve tier, so there is budget for customer-facing product this year.¹
Ninety-one people, eleven engineers. Engineering is split across the ledger and the API, so front-end work has nowhere internal to sit.²
Payouts for marketplaces. They are not a general payments company. Their buyers are marketplace ops leads, so the portal is the product rather than a wrapper around it.³

Why now

March 2026
Raised $28M and named self-serve onboarding as the first thing it funds, so the rebuild sits on a funded roadmap rather than a wish list.¹
July 2026
Posted for a senior front-end engineer, then closed the ad after five weeks with no hire announced, so the internal route looks stalled.⁴
Last week
Shipped a status page after a four-hour outage and apologised for how hard it was to tell what was happening, so trust in the current interface is live.⁵

Who you're meeting

Priya Raman

VP Product

Promoted from within two years ago. She ran the ledger product before this, so she will judge a partner on delivery discipline before visual craft.⁶
Owns onboarding end to end. The self-serve tier is her number, so anything that shortens time to first payout is her problem rather than a nice extra.⁶
Not the only signature. The CFO signed the last two vendor contracts, so plan for a second conversation and ask who else has to see the scope.⁷

Where you fit

strong

Our read, not sourced

Likely pains

No front-end capacity, and the one hire they went out for did not land.
A 2021 portal is the first thing a marketplace ops lead sees while evaluating them.
Self-serve revenue is committed to investors on a timeline the team cannot staff.

Verity does not need an agency to redesign a portal. It needs one to take the whole front end for two quarters while its own engineers stay on the ledger. That is the shape Halyard sells, and it is a harder thing to buy from a design studio.

The risk is that Priya has already framed this internally as a redesign and is shopping for a Figma file. Reframe it early. Ask what happens to the front end after launch and the conversation moves from a project to a standing team.

Talking points

Kestrel, same shape. You took over Kestrel's merchant dashboard while their team stayed on billing, and shipped in nine weeks.
Discovery that ends in a plan. Your two-week discovery produces a build sequence and a fixed first phase, which answers a CFO before he asks.
Their engineers keep the API. You work behind their existing endpoints, so nothing you do blocks the ledger roadmap.

Ask these

What breaks first if self-serve doubles? Tells you whether the portal is the constraint or a symptom of one.
Who else has to agree before we start? Surfaces the CFO in week one instead of week three.
What happened with the front-end hire? Tells you whether they are still trying to solve this internally.
What must the portal do by Q1? Turns a redesign into a dated commitment you can scope against.

Watch out for

Objections

“We should just hire for this.” They tried and stopped, so agree with the instinct, then price a team they can switch off rather than one they carry.
“Agencies don’t know payments.” Raise the Kestrel ledger work before they do, and name the compliance constraints you already built inside.

Deal risks

A decision maker you have not met. The CFO signed the last two contracts, so a scope agreed only with Priya can die quietly in finance.
Scope framed as a redesign. A design-only brief caps this at a small project and hands the build to somebody else.

Sensitivities

The July outage. They have apologised for it once in public. Treat the status page as evidence they take it seriously, not as a problem you are here to fix.

How they communicate

Our read, from their own words