Centsless is a jurisdiction-aware decision and evidence engine for cash rounding
Neutral as to parties, faithful to whichever rule governs the transaction. Consistent, audit-ready infrastructure for cash totals, tender, and refunds as penny availability declines.
How Centsless got here
Centsless began by tracking the practical consequences of America's penny shortage and the fragmented response to cash rounding that followed: businesses rounding independently, states responding with their own rules, and no shared standard behind any of it.
As federal policy evolved, so did the question we were built to answer. It is no longer only “Can businesses round cash transactions?” Increasingly, it is “How do businesses implement rounding correctly, consistently, and transparently?” Centsless exists to help answer that question through independent research, tools, implementation intelligence, and public education. We are not a regulator, legal counsel, or a government-approved standards body.
Why We Built Centsless
The market needed shared infrastructure, not fragmented vendor implementations.
Problem Recognition
Cash-rounding authority began changing across jurisdictions. Transaction systems needed to identify the rule in force, apply it consistently, and preserve why it governed.
Technical Insight
We realized this was an infrastructure problem, not a policy problem. The market needed a jurisdiction-aware execution layer: deterministic, auditable, and faithful to whichever rule governs the transaction.
Building the Infrastructure
We built the compliance engine, simulation-tested it, and began validating it with the market. Not advocacy. Not opinion. Just consistent, auditable execution.
Built by Infrastructure Engineers
The three of us met in the M.S. in Financial Technology programme at the University of Central Florida. The recurring question in that programme was how financial systems prove what they did after the fact, which turned out to be the question underneath everything we have built since.
Kyle Hatfield
Co-Founder / CEO & Security Vision
Leads system security, trust architecture, and compliance design.
Daniel Hobin
Co-Founder / CFO & Data Strategy
Drives data integrity, financial modeling, and analytical accuracy.
Alex Ortega
Co-Founder / CAIO & Implementation
Oversees implementation strategy, automation, and integration readiness.
"The law defines the rule. The POS executes the transaction. Centsless connects the two."
Kyle Hatfield
"The amount you collect and the amount you're owed are no longer the same number. That difference has to land somewhere, and somebody has to be able to explain it later."
Daniel Hobin
"The rounding button is not the compliance layer. The system still has to know which rule applies."
Alex Ortega
Decades of Combined Experience
Enterprise Infrastructure
Combined experience building financial systems infrastructure for banks, fintechs, and enterprises.
Cybersecurity & Compliance
Team background spanning secure system design, audit and evidence architecture, and regulatory compliance.
Financial Systems
Extensive background in payment processing, settlement systems, and multi-jurisdiction financial operations.
Our Principles
Policy Neutrality
We don't set policy. We don't lobby. We build infrastructure that executes whichever rule governs the transaction.
Centsless operates independently of legislative timelines and political processes. Our role is execution, not advocacy.
Technical Rigor
Every rounding decision auditable. Every implementation deterministic.
Built around append-only audit records, simulation-tested across large transaction sets, and designed for the evidentiary standards compliance teams work to.
Market Neutrality
POS-agnostic. Merchant-neutral. Bank-friendly. We're infrastructure for everyone.
We don't compete with POS vendors, merchants, or banks. We provide calculated outcomes and evidence they can all rely on.
Leadership Profiles
Kyle Hatfield
Co-Founder / CEO & Security Vision
"Responsible for system integrity, auditability, and public trust."
Kyle leads the research programme behind Centsless and the standard the platform is held to: every claim traced to enacted text, every correction published rather than quietly fixed. He sets what the engine must prove about its own behaviour and what the company will and will not assert. His perspective comes from roughly fifteen years in retail banking, watching cash operations from the inside, and from several years teaching cybersecurity, where the recurring question is how you establish afterward that a system did what it claimed. He holds a B.S. in Cybersecurity and an M.S. in Financial Technology from the University of Central Florida.
Core Expertise
Daniel Hobin
Co-Founder / CFO & Data Strategy
"Responsible for financial rigor across all calculations, models, and assumptions."
Danny owns the numbers. Every figure Centsless publishes, every assumption in the simulation harness, and the reconciliation logic that separates the taxable price, the exact total and the cash actually collected. Where a value cannot be traced to enacted text, he is the reason the field is left blank rather than estimated. He works in institutional market infrastructure, handling high-volume settlement operations and the reconciliation discipline that comes with them, and brings a background in financial analytics and applied machine learning. He holds an M.S. in Financial Technology from the University of Central Florida.
Core Expertise
Alex Ortega
Co-Founder / CAIO & Implementation
"Translates vision into operational reality at enterprise scale."
Alex is responsible for whether any of this works in a real merchant environment. He owns implementation design, integration readiness and the workflows a multi-location operator would actually follow, and holds the platform to the test of being executable without a consultant. His background is in planning and delivering complex multi-year programmes across aerospace and large-scale entertainment development, alongside automation work deployed across enterprise teams. He holds an M.S. in Financial Technology from the University of Central Florida.