AI-enabled delivery and AWS-based fintech platform for Kafene
Vention helped build Kafene’s core product capabilities from the ground up. The scope included a real-time risk-scoring and underwriting engine, the Kafene Shop marketplace, aggregator partnerships, IVR automation, and a custom contract-generation system.
A dedicated team scaled from two to seven engineers as the platform evolved. AI-enabled development workflows increased engineering efficiency by 15 to 20% and supported consistent, high-quality feature releases over time.
Client overview
Kafene is a fintech startup that helps retailers offer flexible lease-to-own (LTO) financing. Their platform provides real-time underwriting and payment capabilities, which enable merchants to serve customers across a wide range of credit profiles, including those with limited or no credit history.
Project description
When Kafene engaged Vention in November 2022, the company needed a partner who could ship production-ready fintech features at pace. The previous engineering partner hadn’t met expectations for quality or efficiency, and progress had stalled. Kafene needed to diversify its engineering organization and raise output quality by moving away from constant refactoring and bug fixes toward consistently shipping new product capabilities that could support business growth.
Vention designed and built a fully customized fintech platform to support core lending, merchant integrations, AI-enabled workflows, and automation. That work established a stable foundation for reliable operations and long-term growth.
Our solution
Vention assembled a dedicated team that grew from two to 7 engineers as the platform took shape, and began building on AWS using proven tooling and processes.
Core product features
We built and released product capabilities that directly support Kafene’s business model:
- Risk scoring and underwriting module: A real-time scoring engine that assesses risk and helps identify eligible customers for financing.
- Kafene Shop: An integrated marketplace where approved customers can browse and purchase additional goods from partner retailers.
- Ecommerce integrations: “Pay with Kafene” options across ecommerce checkouts, which enable financing directly at the point of purchase.
- Aggregator partnerships: Integrations with additional LTO aggregators to expand distribution reach and increase merchant diversity.
- IVR automation: Automated call routing that reduces manual handling in customer support.
- Contract and PDF generation: A custom, in-house solution for contract generation that automates complex financing paperwork and removes reliance on third-party document tools such as DocuSign or DocuSprings.
Architected for reliability and scale on AWS
The platform runs on a production-grade AWS foundation built around containerized microservices, isolated environments, and layered security controls. Microservices stream data from multiple sources into a unified Snowflake data lake, which enables analytics and reporting without affecting real-time transaction processing.
The architecture supports real-time underwriting and payments while preserving stability, performance, and data integrity as transaction volume grows.
See a detailed breakdown of how Vention designed and stabilized Kafene’s AWS infrastructure here.
We applied AI across the engineering and delivery process, embedding it into development workflows, quality assurance, and operational processes rather than limiting its use to isolated features.
- AI-assisted development, supported by Cursor IDE, improved code quality and increased team efficiency by 15-20%. Vention engineers used AI to navigate large codebases, refactor legacy logic, and reduce the likelihood of common runtime issues such as invalid states and missing validations.
- Automation of repetitive engineering tasks reduced routine work, allowing teams to focus on high-impact initiatives and maintain smoother delivery cycles.
- AI-supported code review through CodeRabbit helped eliminate manual bottlenecks, surface potential issues earlier, and improve overall code reliability, especially in areas with duplicated logic and evolving APIs.
All these practices made it possible to sustain a consistent delivery pace while keeping the platform stable as it continued to evolve.
Our team is ready to discuss your requirements and help turn your AWS or AI goals into a platform built to scale.
Results
Kafene now runs a stable, scalable fintech platform that has been in continuous production since 2022, supporting ongoing product expansion and new feature releases. The system handles real-world underwriting and payment workloads while maintaining predictable delivery and operational stability.
Key outcomes:
- Reduced partner integration time from one to two months to one to two weeks
- Scaled the team from two to seven engineers while maintaining delivery consistency
- Consolidated workload, with seven Vention engineers supporting work previously handled by 14 client-side engineers
- Improved code quality, with 96% of the codebase aligned with established architecture and style standards
- Accelerated pull request review time by 30% through AI-assisted workflows
- Expanded product capabilities, including ecommerce integrations, aggregator partnerships, and the Kafene Shop marketplace
All of these technical improvements translated into measurable business progress for Kafene. The company expanded ecommerce and partner integrations, increased merchant adoption, and continued to grow on a platform designed to scale without disruption.
Three years ago, I made the decision to switch to our external development team, adopting a quality-over-quantity mentality. I made the difficult choice to end our previous partnership and transition to Vention.
In hindsight, that was the best decision I ever made. Almost all of our code is now industry-leading, from our underwriting codebase to our merchant dashboard to our entire payments system. We have been able to rewrite nearly all of the old legacy code while adding new features and entirely new products.
During partner integrations, they often mention that our API is so clean and fast that we are consistently the easiest integration they have ever done. All of this is thanks to the amazing developers at Vention and the innovative processes and perspectives they bring to our day-to-day operations.”
James Schuler
Co-Founder of Kafene
Key stats
Partnership duration
3+ years, ongoing
Team growth
3.5x (from 2 to 7 engineers)
Partner integration time
Reduced from 1-2 months to 1-2 weeks
Engineering efficiency
Increased by 15-20%
Codebase quality
96% aligned with architecture standards
PR review speed
30% faster with AI-assisted review
Tech stack
Frontend
React
Backend
Node.js
Python
AWS foundation
EKS
Aurora
S3
CloudFront
ALB
Lambda
AWS Batch
GenAI
Cursor IDE
CodeRabbit
Data and analytics
Snowflake
QA and testing
Playwright
FAQs
How did AI-assisted development impact Kafene's delivery speed?
AI-assisted workflows increased overall engineering efficiency by 15 to 20% and reduced pull request review time by 30%. Those gains enabled a lean team to maintain a consistent delivery pace as the platform expanded.
What fintech features did Vention build for Kafene?
Vention helped build Kafene’s real-time risk scoring and underwriting engine, the Kafene Shop marketplace, ecommerce checkout integrations such as Pay with Kafene, LTO aggregator partnerships, IVR automation for customer support, and a custom contract generation system that replaced third-party tools like DocuSign.