Coins in the coffin¶

Before the move, the Home’s money came in five ways, all on the about page. The Patrician’s Office sends grants and finds the whole thing amusing in a metropolitan sort of way. Lady Sybil sends an annual cheque with a note about the dragon wing. Dibbler’s sausages pay a tiny royalty that nobody asks about, the werewolves win the weekly bingo night, and a vampire’s coffin by the door serves as the donation box. Behind the coffin sat the real engine: thirty thousand Adopt-a-Legend sponsors paying monthly, through a payment processor the Covenant page never names, which tokenised their cards and sent a webhook to Covenant to say who had paid for which griffin. And behind the tenant sat a sixth way in, the software grant, which was money too, and stopped being money when the tenant did. The scraps for this layer say what the Purple Lantern money page says, with a charity’s twist: a designation does not have to touch a server when it can touch a standing order.

The processor, named¶

The Covenant page calls it “the Home’s donation payment processor” and says the consultant configured it in 2022, so the Home read its own contract three years late. It was the processor every consultant chose in 2022, with a US parent, an Irish contracting entity for European merchants, and the card networks behind it, the arrangement the first stack’s money page found under a Swedish host and reads in full. Thirty thousand monthly gifts, each one a card, each card Visa or Mastercard, each transaction cleared by a company in San Francisco, Purchase or Dublin before a griffin got fed. None of it had been chosen. It had been defaulted.

Mollie¶

The recurring gifts went to Mollie, Mollie B.V. of Keizersgracht 126, Amsterdam, registered with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce and licensed by the Dutch Central Bank as an electronic money institution. Two things on its pages decided it. Client funds sit in a separate foundation, Stichting Mollie Payments, which its Impressum says means a seizure on or bankruptcy of Mollie B.V. does not touch the money in transit, and the Home’s donations are money in transit for a day or two a month. And its recurring payments take the first gift by whatever method the sponsor likes and the later ones by SEPA direct debit, which takes the card network out of the monthly path once the sponsor has signed a mandate. So the sponsors were asked, gently, over a year, as cards expired and letters went out, whether the griffin could be paid for by direct debit instead, and most said yes, because most did not know the difference and the ones who did preferred it.

GoCardless, which does mandates and nothing else, was looked at first and set aside: GoCardless Ltd of London, authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority, outside the Union since 2020. Not a reason on its own. A reason when a Dutch company does the same thing.

What the coffin does not do¶

The coffin takes coins, and coins go to the bank in a bag on Fridays, the one payment path with no dependency graph at all. The Patrician’s grants and Lady Sybil’s cheque arrive by transfer and cheque and are paid in by hand. The royalty arrives when Dibbler remembers. The bingo is cash. None of those needed a processor, and none of them can be stopped by one, so the Head of Fundraising keeps the coffin by the door and has never once suggested a card reader for it.

What the grant hid¶

Under the tenant, the mailbox, the file store, the chat and the login had come free with each other on a grant whose terms are on the tenant page. Under the four landlords each has a price on a page: four euros a month per mailbox at mailbox.org, Threema’s NGO rate per user, the Storage Share’s plan, a Windows Server licence for the labelled box, and Mollie’s fees on the gifts. The finance team did the sums and put them to the Patrician’s Office as a line in the next grant application, under the heading the architect suggested, which was not “sovereignty” but “not being switched off”. Vetinari, the note back said, found it amusing in a metropolitan sort of way, and approved it.

Under the Royal Bank¶

The Home banks at the Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork, and the reading that the sector page did for Covenant applies here too. Golem Trust’s own description lists the Royal Bank among the critical systems it hosts, and everything Golem Trust hosts runs on Hetzner Cloud in Finland. So the Home’s bank, its donor ledger, its files and its identity provider share a datacentre company at the bottom, under four contracts with four parties, none of whom told the Home about the others. The contract page’s last column got a fourth line. The safe disk on the premises page exists for that, and the bank stays.

The coffin¶

   sponsors, 30,000 ── SEPA mandates at Mollie, Amsterdam ── webhook ──► Covenant
        (cards for a first gift only)                                        │
                                                                             ▼
   grants, cheque, royalty, bingo, the coffin ── by hand ──► the Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork
                                                                    (on Golem Trust, on Hetzner)
   the software grant: gone, and on the next grant application as "not being switched off"

The cash paths were left as they were, already the most independent thing the Home owned.

What could go wrong?

Mollie suspends the account, and thirty thousand mandates sit with a company that cannot collect them until another institution takes them over, a month of feeding bills the coffin cannot cover.
Hetzner stops serving Golem Trust and the Home on the same afternoon, the Royal Bank’s systems go down with the files, the identity provider and Covenant, and the Home discovers what four contracts on one yard look like.
A card network’s compliance desk blocks the Home, and the first gifts stop while the mandates carry on, the right way round for the first time.
The next grant application is refused, and “not being switched off” turns out to cost what the tenant’s grant had been worth.

The processor says no, what now? The mandates are the sponsors’ and the Home’s, held by Mollie under Dutch law, and they move to another institution the way a bank account does, in weeks and not months. Meanwhile the letters still go out, the coffin still fills on Fridays, and Lady Sybil’s cheque arrives in the same month it always does, which the finance team has learned to count on more than any processor.

Granny Weatherwax keeps her money in a tin under the floor and has never been overdrawn, mostly because the bank has never found the tin.