The First Koho Transaction (Koho Story)

⸺ by Charles Iliya Krempeaux

⸺ published 2016-03-30T20:50:42-07:00

This is the story of the first purchase ever made on a Koho card.

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Amy Soetopo, who was a software engineer at Stanley Park Ventures (SPV) and did the original front-end software engineering work for Koho, was leaving SPV going to Spain.

She was having a going away party this day.

Before we all (at Koho) went to her party, Daniel Eberhard checked the mailbox.

We had been expecting the Visa white-cards to arrive for the last couple weeks, but it just happened that they were in the mailbox this time when we checked.

("White-cards" are real working Visa cards meant for testing purposes, with no decorations or anything else. Just a white plastic card with a magnetic strip and CVV on the back, and the card number and expiry date on the front. Nothing else — no names, no logos, nothing.)

As the last of us left the party, Joel Skrepnek looked at me and said something like, “we could load the card”.

To which I responded with something like, “we should load the card”.

We went to the Koho office, where Joel logged into the Galileo Processing administrative system and put $200 on the white card.

(Galileo Processing is a Visa card payment processor. And like all payment processors, they connect Visa to the bank account.)

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It was late at this time of the evening, and there wasn't much open.

We (i.e., Joel Skrepnek and I (Charles Iliya Krempeaux) ) walked around a bit, and decided to go into the Starbucks on Water Street, in downtown Vancouver.

I convinced the girl working at the Starbucks counter to let me use the white-card, and I bought 2 lemonloafs. (One for myself and one for Joel.)

I think I told her something like:

I am from the bank, and I need to test the credit card payment system.

Someone older might have refused me — but the young girl working at that Starbucks seemed to believe me and let me make the purchase.

The first Koho transaction happened this day. 🙂

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Charles Iliya Krempeaux is the founding chief technology officer (CTO) of Koho Financial — a Canadian fintech company that provides banking services. From 2015 to 2018 he worked on Koho. He figured out how to build a bank — and built one from scratch. This is the story from his point-of-view.