Case study: A 90-day reconciliation build for a greenfield digital insurer

Sole product owner, discovery to pilot, December 2025 - March 2026. The client is a pre-launch digital-first general insurer and is not named here for confidentiality.

Context

A greenfield insurer preparing for market launch needed its money-in stack built from scratch: premium collection across online and offline channels, receipting, and reconciliation. There was no existing ops team, no legacy system, and a fixed 90-day window to a working pilot. I was the sole PM on the engagement, hired specifically for digital payments and reconciliation depth.

The problem

For an insurer, reconciliation is not a back-office report - it is the trust layer. A premium that cannot be matched to a bank credit is a policy that should not exist yet. The build had to handle two structurally different money paths from day one:

• Offline premium (cheque, cash, direct bank transfer): no payment gateway in the loop, so receipting data must reconcile directly against bank data. A 2-way match.
• Online premium (gateway-mediated): three records of the same truth - receipting tool, payment gateway, bank. A 3-way match.

Key decisions

Build reconciliation in-house, not via a recon vendor. A vendor would have added integration lead time the 90-day window could not absorb, and an external dependency on the insurer's most trust-critical flow. We built the matching engine in-house instead.

Reconcile before issuance, not after. The tool's core rule: only fully reconciled values get approved. Receipts are matched before policy issuance rather than chased after the fact. Designing leakage out of the flow beats detecting it downstream.

Partner selection as product scope. I selected the banking partner and the primary payment gateway, and owned partner specifications and integration sequencing - because in a 90-day build, vendor choice IS the architecture.

Outcome

The tool shipped into pilot before I rolled off; the insurer's formal market launch followed about two months later. Honest scope note: this was a pre-launch build, so there are no live-volume metrics to claim - the value of this project is the reconciliation design and the delivery ownership, not scale.

Why this project matters in my work

It is the productised version of three years running merchant settlements, reconciliation, and chargebacks operations at a major Indian bank. Operating recon flows taught me where they break; this engagement was the chance to design them so they do not.

Ruturaj Sahasrabudhe | ruturaj.mms@gmail.com | linkedin.com/in/ruturajsahasrabudhe