A single missed notification can delay payment, tie up hundreds of heads of cattle, and strain trust between buyers and sellers. AGEX solved that gap by automating the entire trade lifecycle—turning fragile, manual processes into a fast, auditable platform for barn managers and traders.
AGEX’s application has become reliable, in not only the sense of sales creations, but an interactive and reliable source for our customers. The approvals have sped up and there are fewer mistakes and questions we receive from our customers about their accounts.
What agex does
AGEX (https://servicing.agex.io/) is a livestock finance and trading platform that streamlines cattle transactions with in-barn and online financing and secure trade clearing. Founded in 2016, AGEX has supported over 11,000 producers and facilitated more than $190 million in livestock trade.
The problem
As AGEX scaled, manual processes exposed three core weaknesses:
- Fragile workflows: trade stages lived in disparate files and ad-hoc tools.
- Slow operations: manual checks and notifications created delays and increased the risk of errors.
- Audit & credit risk: lenders and buyers needed verifiable, auditable records to extend credit confidently.
These constraints slowed feature delivery and limited the platform’s ability to scale while keeping service consistent.
The Approach — How AGEX Is Built
AGEX replaced brittle manual processes with a centralized, automated system built on Python and Django. The team prioritized speed of delivery and operational reliability, using Django’s batteries-included features plus a handful of targeted libraries.
Why Django?
Django provides authentication, ORM, routing, templating, and an admin out of the box, letting developers ship features instead of plumbing infrastructure. Industry writeups support Django’s ability to speed development and shorten time-to-market.
Key building blocks
- Customized Django admin — provides a manage-by-exception back end that you can tailor to workflows, so ops get immediate value without a full custom UI.
- Django ORM — the ORM streamlined database interactions by turning complex SQL into simple Python queries and integrates cleanly with the admin, enabling faster iteration as data models evolve.
- Django-apscheduler — schedules and runs background jobs (due-trade checks, notifications, credit-limit monitoring).
- django-river (forked & extended) — the workflow engine: each trade advances through states; transitions can be triggered by users or scheduled jobs and fire notifications or business rules.
Architecture
AGEX’s architecture was designed to balance speed of delivery with operational safety. Using Docker containers and AWS Lightsail, the team could deploy quickly and roll back instantly if needed—giving developers the flexibility to ship features fast and collect client feedback early.
For communication, services like Twilio (SMS) and AWS Simple Email Service handled notifications reliably at scale. Auth0 streamlined authentication and access control, letting the team skip the common “build auth from scratch” hurdle and focus on core functionality. Finally, PostgreSQL paired seamlessly with Django’s ORM, providing a stable, efficient backbone for AGEX’s data models.
Workflow Notification system
The notification system can notify different actors via SMS, Email and internal notifications easily, using text templates configured via the admin dashboard
Security, Compliance & Data Integrity
- Auth0 for authentication: standardized sign-in and role-based access control so AGEX controls who can view or act on trade data without custom auth code.
- Encrypted fields: sensitive values (Money related properties) are stored encrypted using libraries at the database level.
- Audit trail: Django’s ORM provides audit fields (created/updated timestamps), producing a clear, queryable history for each trade.
Results — What Changed
- Faster feature delivery thanks to Django’s integrated tooling.
- Automated checks and alerts reduced missed steps and manual workload.
- Stateful workflows produced a single source of truth for every trade, improving auditability and lender confidence.
- A predictable, scalable platform enabled faster iteration and better service for producers and partners.