PayTech Neo

Financial technology is a crowded space, and most of the interesting problems in it are not technical. They are organisational: how do you build a product suite that holds together, a team that can execute, and a commercial structure that gives a young fintech a real chance of going somewhere?

Acoustic took on PayTech Neo as a venture project, with Erik Ingvoldstad serving as CEO and co-founder. Over almost eight years, the engagement covered the full arc of building an early-stage fintech from the inside: product strategy, team building, cost management, operational setup, and new product development.

The product suite was built around a clear thesis: that banks are sitting on data and infrastructure that their business customers never fully benefit from. The Neo platform addressed that gap across four distinct but connected products.

Neo Engage

Neo Engage was conceived and architected by Erik from the ground up, and it started where all good product thinking should: with a specific, real customer need. A client's frustration with how little their bank understood about their business, despite holding years of transaction data, became the seed of the concept. That observation drove the entire product from ideation through design to build.

The core insight was that banks already hold the most valuable data their business customers generate, but almost none of it gets used to serve those customers better. Neo Engage changed that. By combining bank transaction data, external market intelligence, and AI, it gave banks the infrastructure to deliver hyper-personalised, timely communication to business clients at scale, moving from generic outreach to genuinely relevant engagement driven by what customers were actually doing financially.

The architecture was designed to be data-agnostic and Open Banking-enabled, meaning it could sit on top of existing banking systems without requiring a rip-and-replace. Erik led the product vision, the technical architecture, and the build from inception, making Neo Engage the most technically ambitious product in the PayTech Neo suite.

Neo Clarity

Neo Clarity transformed raw transaction data into readable, contextualised statements, mapping coded merchant names to recognisable brands, adding transaction context, and surfacing unusual activity automatically. The problem it solved is more common than most banks acknowledge: 58% of cardholders find billing descriptions confusing, and unclear statements drive over a quarter of all transaction disputes.

Neo Expense

Neo Expense addressed the operational burden of business spending and expense management, bringing together real-time card management, automated reconciliation, AI-supported approvals, and receipt digitisation into a single platform built to integrate with existing banking infrastructure.

Neo Receipts

Neo Receipts sat within that ecosystem as a standalone capability, using AI and OCR to digitise and match receipts automatically across platforms, eliminating the manual effort that makes expense reporting one of the most quietly expensive administrative processes in any organisation.

The Build

Beyond the product work, the operational build was substantial. A team of four was hired and structured, an office was established in India to support cost-efficient delivery, and the overall cost base was rationalised to give the business a sustainable runway.

Acoustic concluded its active involvement in PayTech Neo to pursue other projects. The product thinking, the team structure, and the operational foundations built during that period remain.