So far this series has followed a payment and named the parties along the way. Now follow the money, because each party takes a piece, and those pieces explain most of the decisions that come later. Take a $100 purchase. Every figure here is illustrative, and real rates vary widely. The merchant doesn’t receive…
Cards look alike in a wallet, but what sits behind them differs. The type of card mostly tells you one thing: where the money comes from when the cardholder pays. With a credit card, the issuer lends the money. It pays for the purchase up front, and the cardholder repays later, with interest if…
In the last post, a tap travelled from a coffee shop to a bank and back in two seconds (usually, in 2 seconds, but can go beyond that – and this overall acceptable response time varies by countries/regions). Several parties handled it on the way, and the same few names keep coming up. This…
I’ve worked in payments for a long time, and card transactions still surprise smart people. A hold that won’t release. An amount that changes after you’ve paid. A refund that takes a week. So I’m going to write about them, in short posts. Each tries to say what to expect, why it happens, and…
My LinkedIn headline currently reads: Technical Product Leader | Payments & Fintech | ex-Nium · ex-AmEx. I haven’t decided how long I’ll keep it that way. Some days it feels like useful context. Other days it feels like I’m leaning on something I should have moved past. I haven’t fully resolved it, which is…
There’s a particular kind of suffering that has nothing to do with what’s actually happening to you, and everything to do with what you’re telling yourself about what’s happening. You miss one deadline at work, and within minutes you’re convinced you’re going to be fired, your career is over, and you were never good…
Somewhere in the near future, and the leading edge of that future is already visible today, you will tell an AI to book you a flight, and the AI will book the flight. Not research flights and show you options. Not open a browser tab and wait for you to click confirm. It will…
Start with a simple question. When a company in California pays a software vendor in Bangalore, what actually happens between the moment someone clicks send and the moment the vendor’s bank account shows a number? The answer, if you have spent any time in the payments industry, is that a lot happens. The bank…
There is a particular quality of unhappiness that is generated not by anything that has actually happened to you but by looking at what is happening to someone else. It is a familiar feeling. You are doing reasonably well, by most available measures. And then you encounter evidence of someone who seems to be…
There is something happening quietly on the internet right now, and it does not have a name yet, which is probably why it has not been ruined yet. It shows up in small moments. A person posts a painting they did over the weekend. The proportions are slightly off. The colours do not match…