Intro

The best place to learn about payments is to work for a large bank or fintech startup. The best place to learn about global payments is obviously a global bank or a startup. But working in the bank is not for everyone and startup don’t give you a lot of time to get up to speed. When I started in my current role, I was lucky to have an experience working in the bank before and knowing quite a bit about US payment systems, but learning about other countries was overwhelming. So, naturally, I’m trying to build a second best place to learn about payment systems of the world.

Payments underlie the world’s economy, from you paying for coffee at a Starbucks to large companies paying billions of dollars (or pounds, franks, or euros) for goods and services. Interestingly enough, a lot of the payment infrastructure (or payment rails) are built to handle transactions of a few cents or of a few billions in the same manner, so understanding principles behind helps to understand how economy at large works.

This set of articles is for anyone who wants to understands complex world of payments, from the basic principles of

There are several other books or places, I can’t recommend enough:

• Payments Systems in the US by Glebrook Partners
• Bits about Money by Patrick McKenzie