AI Engineer · Fintech Operations

I fixed broken payment systems live at 2am.
Now I build AI that survives production.

At 2am a SWIFT MT103 batch failed with 4,112 records held. For ten years a human paged on-call, found the poison record, resubmitted the batch, and released settlement by morning with no loss and no sleep. The same job now runs as agents that isolate the record, resubmit, and settle while the human stays asleep.

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ex-HSBCex-Société GénéraleMcGillMontreal
Watch an engagement run
Joseph Bankole 01 / About

I got into payments by accident.

I was born in Nigeria and grew up in Lagos. At nine I moved to the United States, to New Hampshire, where my mother was studying at Dartmouth. Then Eaglebrook School in Massachusetts, then Canada and McGill. I got used to arriving somewhere new, reading the room and learning how to contribute.

Payments was not a plan. I studied electrical engineering at McGill with a focus on digital system design and automation. I planned on working on control systems but found myself at HSBC managing market risk systems instead. Fast forward to today, I have spent ten years keeping bank systems running, with the last five of those in payments.

I started building with AI because I kept seeing people post about what they had made, and it looked like something I could try. My partner and I now run our household on an app I wrote for us. Outside work I make music in Ableton Live and engineer the audio for a friend's podcast, Pros in the Arena.

I am building and optimizing with AI in production, and I write down what I learn for anyone making the same moves, or just trying to be happier in the job they have. Follow along here.

02 / The delivery

Watch an engagement run.

Scope to Run, the way I actually ship. Scroll through it, or drag the timeline.

01

Scope

one problem, named

founder decides, agents build

02

Build

The ARCHV iOS app, build 40

agent fleets, every diff reviewed

03

Verify

238 tests, none failed

fresh-install UI gates

review caught shipping bugs in 4 of 6 builds

05

Run

a desk that publishes every morning

health probes that email before users notice

Drag, or use arrow keys
03 / Projects

Things I have shipped.

Two live products, both built and run end to end. One tells football's story with an iOS app live on the App Store, and one explains AI news in plain English.

The ARCHV crest logo

The ARCHV

Football history, illustrated · @thearchvfc

An immersive archive of football's greatest moments, retold across social and in an iOS app that is live on the App Store. The owned site is the brand's credibility surface and link-in-bio destination, built to an awwwards-grade brief, with a WebGL hero and scroll choreography. The whole content operation behind it runs as a fleet of scheduled AI agents: generation, scheduling, analytics, and a performance log that breeds toward what works.

thearchv.ca → App Store →
ARCHV AI logo

ARCHV AI

The week in AI, in plain English · @thearchv.ai

An Instagram that turns recent AI news into plain, single-graphic posts, with a Substack for the longer reads. It runs on a scheduled agent that pulls the week's real stories, writes each post to a fixed brief, and checks every one against hard rules on sourcing and voice before it ships. No invented numbers, no hype, one direct question to end on.

Instagram → Substack →
04 / How I scope a build

How I scope a build.

This is how I size a two-week build. Answer three questions and the sketch fills in, honest about what fits in a fortnight.

1 What runs your ops today?
2 What eats the most hours?
3 How would you want it delivered?
05 / Blog

Field notes from building in production.

Lived-experience write-ups on payment infrastructure and running AI agents against real work. Expanded from what I post each week.

Sep 2026 An agent's retraction is no more evidence than its reportA verification agent said it had invented its sources after I had published from its report. My desk checked each published claim. Every one was true. → Sep 2026 Xcode 27 broke every test destinationA stale CoreSimulator left no test destination and simctl hung on a password panel. The second trap was a destination naming a phone iOS 27 does not ship. → Sep 2026 38 stills in one ffmpeg graph broke a 34-minute renderOne filter graph with 38 looped PNGs died three minutes into the render. Reading each still once and rendering in 85 chunks got it through. →

Read all posts →

06 / News

The brief on agentic commerce.

A running digest of payments, agentic commerce, and the AI stories that touch how money will move. Sourced, edited, and written plainly.

Six banks wrote down what shoppers fear about AI agents, and PayPal signed up to Muse within a dayNatWest, Bank of America, Capital One, ING, Commonwealth Bank of Australia and ASB published five non-binding principles for agentic commerce on 22 September 2026. PayPal said it will support Meta’s Muse agent at checkout, with no launch date. Amazon put its Seller Assistant agent inside Anthropic’s Claude in beta on 23 September. → Amazon shut Meta’s Muse out of Amazon.com, and Shopify put Shop Pay behind it the next morningAmazon began blocking Meta’s Muse agent from buying on Amazon.com on the night of 20 September 2026 and asked Meta to remove Amazon from the product. On the morning of 21 September Shopify’s chief executive said Shop Pay will do agentic checkout with Muse across every Shopify store. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission announced a roundtable series the same day, with artificial intelligence and agentic finance as the first session on 28 October 2026. → Stripe’s Link wallet now checks out for three different AI agents, and each one buys with a card number that works onceStripe put Link inside Meta’s Muse agent on 8 September 2026, after wiring xAI’s Grok Bot on 28 August and Instinct, a text-message assistant from Spear Street Technology, earlier the same month. In every case the consumer approves the total in the chat and the agent is issued a single-use virtual card scoped to that purchase. Stripe puts Link at 300 million users and more than 1 million businesses. Stripe and Advent International’s $53 billion offer for PayPal was rejected on 15 July 2026. → HM Treasury laid a draft instrument taking UK stablecoin payments out of the cryptoasset dealing rules, and PYMNTS puts merchants with agent-readable product data at 15%HM Treasury laid a draft statutory instrument on 15 September 2026 excluding UK qualifying stablecoins from dealing as principal, dealing as agent and arranging deals in qualifying cryptoassets, and from cryptoasset safeguarding where they are held for a payment transaction. Lending and borrowing stay in scope, and the explanatory memorandum dates the cryptoassets regime coming fully into force to 25 October 2027. PYMNTS Intelligence reports that 15% of merchants have structured product data an agent can read, and that 59% of AI-assisted purchases still end at Amazon. → The OCC gave three stablecoin firms conditional trust charters, one of them pitched as a fiduciary for AI agents, and Ant International now offers a guarantee against losses from an agent’s mistakesThe Office of the Comptroller of the Currency gave conditional national trust bank charters to Bastion Platforms, Catena and Agora on 18 September 2026, and Catena Labs filed in May to become a regulated fiduciary for AI agents. American Banker reports that daily volume on x402, a payment rail built for AI agents, fell 93% between January and September. Ant International launched AgentSafePay, a guarantee against losses from agent errors such as prompt injection. → Circle switched on Arc with Visa and Mastercard among its validators, and Alchemy’s AgentCard now pays with one-time Mastercard credentialsCircle launched the public mainnet of Arc, a Layer 1 blockchain that charges fees in USDC and is pitched at AI agents, on 16 September 2026, with BlackRock, DTCC, Mastercard and Visa among its founding validators. On 17 September Alchemy said AgentCard now gives agents one-time-use Mastercard credentials through Mastercard Agent Pay. Since 15 September Cloudflare's preset for new ad-funded sites blocks browser agents on pages that show ads. →

See the full digest →