BaridiMob is, by a wide margin, the most widely adopted mobile payment method in Algeria, built on top of Algérie Poste's CCP postal account infrastructure. Any escrow platform that wants genuine mass-market reach in Algeria has to support it — not as an afterthought bolted onto a system designed around card payments, but as a first-class settlement rail with the same reliability guarantees as any other funding method. This is the engineering story of how we built that pipeline.
The core challenge was reconciling two systems with fundamentally different design philosophies. Thiqaty's escrow ledger is built around atomic, immediately-consistent state transitions: a transaction moves from funded to delivered to released in discrete, cryptographically-signed steps, and every state change must be traceable and irreversible. BaridiMob transfers, by contrast, involve a settlement window — a transfer is initiated, confirmed by the sender, and then settles into the recipient account, with confirmation callbacks that don't always arrive in the same order they were triggered.
Our first design decision was to treat every BaridiMob transaction as an external event that our system observes and reconciles against, rather than an operation that Thiqaty directly controls end-to-end. When a buyer funds an escrow using BaridiMob, Thiqaty generates a unique payment reference tied to that specific escrow agreement, and the buyer completes the transfer through their own BaridiMob app using that reference. Our system then polls and listens for the corresponding settlement confirmation, matching it against the expected reference and amount before marking the escrow as funded.
This reference-matching approach solved the ordering problem, but introduced a new one: what happens if a confirmation is delayed, duplicated, or never arrives due to a network issue on Algérie Poste's side? We built a reconciliation layer that runs on a fixed interval, cross-checking pending Thiqaty escrow agreements against BaridiMob's settlement records, with idempotent processing so that a duplicate confirmation for an already-settled escrow is safely ignored rather than double-crediting the account.
Latency was the next major engineering constraint. Users expect an escrow to show as funded within moments of completing a BaridiMob transfer, not minutes later. We built a hybrid confirmation model: an immediate soft-confirmation as soon as the buyer marks the transfer as sent within the Thiqaty app (which unlocks a limited set of next steps, like notifying the seller that funding is in progress), followed by a hard-confirmation once the reconciliation layer verifies the matching settlement record from Algérie Poste's side. Funds are only ever released to a seller after hard-confirmation, preserving the core guarantee that money in escrow is real, settled money.
Security required an equally deliberate approach. Every BaridiMob payment reference generated by Thiqaty is single-use and cryptographically bound to a specific escrow agreement ID, buyer account, and amount, which prevents a reference from being reused for a different transaction or replayed by a malicious actor who intercepts it. Reference generation, matching, and reconciliation are all logged onto the same immutable ledger that records every other escrow state change, so a BaridiMob-funded escrow has exactly the same auditability as a card-funded one.
We also had to design for the failure modes specific to a postal-infrastructure-backed payment rail: intermittent connectivity in certain regions, occasional settlement delays during peak periods, and the reality that BaridiMob confirmations sometimes require a manual nudge from the user's side (re-opening the app, refreshing a screen) before the underlying transfer state updates. Rather than treating these as edge cases to patch around, we built explicit states into the escrow lifecycle — 'payment pending confirmation' is a first-class status, visible to both buyer and seller, rather than an internal implementation detail hidden behind a generic loading spinner.
The result, after months of testing against real BaridiMob traffic patterns, is a settlement pipeline that lets any Algerian with a CCP account and the BaridiMob app fund an escrow transaction as easily as they'd send money to a friend or family member — while giving Thiqaty the same cryptographic guarantees around fund custody and dispute resolution that we provide for CIB and Edahabia card payments. Given that BaridiMob is the primary financial tool for a huge share of Algerians who don't hold a card-linked bank account, this pipeline is arguably what makes Thiqaty usable for the majority of the country, not just for the segment of the population with existing card access.
Building for Algeria's actual payment infrastructure — rather than assuming card rails are universal, the way many escrow products originally designed for other markets do — is, in our view, the only way to build an escrow platform that genuinely serves the Algerian market rather than merely operating in it.
Yassine Boudiaf
Senior Backend Engineer at Thiqaty