Bridging the API Gap: How Optexity Enabled Daily Financial Monitoring for a High-Growth Fintech
At a Glance
- Customer: Piston (Fintech / Fuel Automation)
- Stakeholder: Shivam Shah, Co-Founder & COO1
- The Challenge: Rapid growth caused data fragmentation; critical financial data was locked inside third-party portals (FedEx, TMS) without APIs.
- The Solution: Optexity AI Agents deployed to autonomously retrieve, parse, and reconcile data from legacy portals.
- The Outcome: Automated daily reconciliation, enhanced fraud detection, and elimination of manual data entry.
About Piston
Piston is a fast-growing fintech company revolutionizing fuel payments and analytics for the trucking industry. By integrating directly with gas stations and fleets, Piston provides a cardless fuel payment platform that offers price monitoring, real-time data analytics, and robust fraud prevention. With a recent tenfold growth in their customer base, Piston has become a critical partner for trucking companies looking to optimize fuel spend.
The Challenge: The "API Gap" in Logistics
As Piston scaled, their promise of "real-time analytics" hit a roadblock: the fragmented nature of the logistics industry. While Piston’s core technology was cutting-edge, the external systems they needed to communicate with—specifically FedEx portals and various Transport Management Systems (TMS)—were often legacy platforms lacking modern APIs.
To generate accurate analytics and fraud reports, Piston’s operations team had to:
- Manually log in to FedEx portals daily to download invoices and transaction reports.
- Manually scrape financial data from third-party TMS platforms to reconcile credit card transactions.
- Manually merge this fragmented data with Piston’s internal fuel logs.
This manual friction delayed insights, introduced human error, and made daily monitoring nearly impossible at scale. Piston needed a way to build integrations where no APIs existed.
The Solution: AI-Powered Browser Automation
Piston turned to Optexity to automate the "last mile" of their data ingestion. Instead of building fragile internal scripts or hiring more operations staff, Piston deployed Optexity’s AI agents to act as a virtual workforce.
1. Automating FedEx Financials
Optexity built an automated workflow that logs into the FedEx portal daily. The agent navigates the complex UI, locates the specific analytics reports (PDFs and Excel sheets), downloads them, and parses the relevant data directly into Piston’s central database.
- Before: Weekly manual downloads by a human operator.
- After: Daily, autonomous retrieval delivered directly to Piston’s analytics engine by 8:00 AM.
2. TMS Reconciliation & Fraud Prevention
Piston leveraged Optexity to bridge the gap with third-party TMS platforms. The agents now autonomously pull financial transaction data—specifically credit card logs—and cross-reference them with Piston’s fuel payment records.
- The Impact: This effectively closed the loop on fuel fraud. By automatically matching TMS trip data with fuel purchases, Piston can instantly flag discrepancies (e.g., a fuel charge occurring 500 miles away from the truck’s reported location).
The ROI: Visibility as a Competitive Advantage
The primary return on investment was operational visibility. Before Optexity, data analysis was a reactive, weekly task. Now, it is a proactive, daily routine.
- Eliminated Manual Entry: Zero human hours are now spent logging into portals to fetch files.
- Daily "Heartbeat" Updates: Management receives daily informed updates, allowing for faster decision-making.
- Enhanced Fraud Security: The speed of data reconciliation means fraud patterns are detected in hours, not weeks.
"Optexity didn't just save us time; they gave us eyes on our data that we simply didn't have before. We went from fragmented, weekly reports to a daily, unified view of our financial health."
— Shivam Shah, Co-Founder & COO, Piston
