Anton Payments on Why They Bought Instead of Built

The math isn’t always obvious at the moment. Just ask Ryan Olson, who spent two decades in payments before becoming the Founder of Anton Payments, a cross-border payout infrastructure platform powered by Anton Engine, the AI risk engine powering the platform. When it came time to build the payments infrastructure for his company, he thought back to when he needed a fence for his yard and applied that same logic.

For the fence, he priced out a table saw, lumber, and all of the materials to do the work himself. It looked doable on paper. Then his husband did the math. By the time you factor in the time spent working, hiring someone else to do the work would cost slightly more, but save weeks of time.

“I calculate the time on everything,” Olson says. “If I can’t quantify something, it’s not worth discussing.”

That same logic was applied to building the vault internally or finding a third-party vault provider. Anton Payments is built to handle transactions across multiple merchants, in different regions, and payment types. Getting an infrastructure decision wrong was not an option.

The Case Against Building It Yourself

Because Anton Payments is a cross-border payout infrastructure platform, Olson had several non-negotiables that he needed for the vault:

• PCI Level 1 certified to handle PII and payment instruments across multiple merchants.
• Deterministic fingerprinting to do cross-merchant entity resolution without touching raw data.
• The ability to run operations on underlying data (like sanctions screening) without it persisting in their infrastructure.

The search started the way most things do for a payments veteran with two decades of experience: a conversation at a trade show.

At Consensus in Toronto, Olson polled a few colleagues who all said the same thing: evaluate Basis Theory. The word-of-mouth support was consistent enough to move Basis Theory from consideration to the top of the list.

“Basis Theory checked those boxes, and then some,” Olson says. “It would take me 18-36 months to build what Basis Theory offers. I don’t have the luxury of that, and I’m not sure how many other folks in my position would say they do.”

The confirmation came from the head of technology at a mutual client, and someone he described as hard to impress. Olson recommended three options as they were navigating a transition from a previous provider. They chose Basis Theory.

“He said it was one of the easiest integrations he’d ever had, and the migration path was incredible,” Olson says. “If you can put a smile on that man’s face, that tells me everything I need to know.”

Built in 72 Hours, Saved 36 Months

After Basis Theory was identified as the solution, Olson warned his husband he’d be unreachable for a week to focus on the implementation.

“Three days later, I walked out of my office, and it’s done,” Olson explains. “And instead of giving the rest of that week to my husband, I was moving on to more work!”

The sandbox is where everything came together.

• Fingerprinting worked in real-time.
• Anton AI identified the same payee across multiple platforms without touching any raw data.

Ryan constructed a secondary SDK on top of Basis Theory's existing SDK, complete with a failover directly to the raw API. The architecture he put in place in those 72 hours became the foundational layer of the entire Anton Payments platform—not a bolt-on or temporary bridge—but the core PII isolation layer that every merchant's data flows through from the moment of ingestion.

“My AI was just flying,” Olson says. "Without Basis Theory, I wouldn't be able to do some of the things I wanted to do."

Whether the use case involves traditional payment rails, push-to-card, cross-border transfers, or crypto, none of it requires specific handling. Because Basis Theory was built to be agnostic, Olson felt that freedom from day one.

“Basis Theory is accelerating me,” Olson says. “I can tokenize all of my data and fingerprint it. I cannot stress enough that without Basis Theory, none of this happens.”

Zero Trust, Zero Regrets

Anton Payments is all-in with Basis Theory.

Every merchant's payee data, including names, bank accounts, IBANs, and government ID, is tokenized through Basis Theory on ingestion. Fingerprinting allows cross-merchant entity resolution, detecting that the same real-world payee exists across multiple merchants without ever seeing raw data. Reactors and the Proxy handle sanctions screening against OFAC and any other watchlist, without raw PII ever touching Anton's infrastructure.

“The net result is that our entire AI risk engine operates on tokens,” Olson explains. “Zero PII anywhere in our environment.”

Day-to-day, Olson says Basis Theory “just works” and that it “doesn’t require constant babysitting.”

“Basis Theory is one of those infrastructure decisions where you set it up right, and it fades into the background, which is exactly what you want from something this critical,” Olson says.

Beyond what it does internally, Basis Theory changed how Anton Payments works with external partners. The Proxy can handle how one network partner requires raw data on every payout. Another partner tokenizes data in their own format. Because Olson stores raw data at Basis Theory, he's never dependent on matching any single provider's tokenization scheme.

"If I ever need to reroute payments through another provider, I'm not locked in," Olson explains. "I'm storing the raw details at Basis Theory and creating this transparent ecosystem that can route data wherever it needs to go."

Every infrastructure decision has come back to one question: can it be quantified? Basis Theory made it straightforward. Olson estimated avoiding $50,000 on certification costs (ISO, SOC 2, PCI), along with another $80,000 to build token infrastructure. He estimates the numbers would climb past six figures after hiring two engineers and working on this for between 18 and 36 months.

“If I can’t quantify it, it’s not worth discussing,” Olson says. “There are your numbers.”

Turns out it wasn’t just the fence that was worth hiring out. 72 hours after starting the Basis Theory implementation, Olson was moving on to the next project.