The Payment Bible

Welcome to The Payment Bible, a straightforward and casually written guide to one of the world's most invisible yet essential systems: how money actually moves in electronic payments. Whether you've just joined a payment company or simply wonder why your coffee tap sometimes fails right when you need caffeine most, this guide will take you through it all — from the origins of electronic payments to the key players, transaction flows, pricing models, chargebacks, and those mysterious acronyms people love to drop in meetings.

Grab a coffee, beer, tea, or whatever keeps your neurons firing, and let's dive in. And if you don't finish it in one sitting, no worries. It's about payments, after all.

Introduction

Why did I end up in payments? Probably for the same reason most people do — by chance. One job led to curiosity, which led to more questions, which somehow became a career built around understanding how money actually moves. Payments, much like other invisible systems that quietly keep the world running, form a vast web of connected dots. Whether you're paying for dinner, buying groceries, sending money to a friend, or booking a flight, payments are everywhere. Yet few people know what really happens after they click Pay.

Let me tell you a story. A few months ago, I walked into a Tommy Hilfiger store, ready to pay. The cashier looked at me apologetically and said, "Card payments aren't working. Only cash". I asked since when. She replied, "Since Monday". It was Saturday.

Five full days without card acceptance. I couldn't help thinking about the silent cost behind that outage... all the customers who turned around, the lost revenue, the staff repeating the same sentence all week. That's payments in a nutshell: invisible when they work, unforgettable when they don't.

I ended up hunting for a nearby ATM. The only one around was in a rather sketchy corner shop. I tried to withdraw some cash. My card got blocked. What a nightmare. To this day I still swear that I did not enter my PIN 3 times incorrectly. Apparently I did.

Working in this industry can feel like being dropped into a bowl of alphabet soup: PCI, 3DS, EMV, BIN, SCA... sometimes it really feels like whoever can throw out the most acronyms wins. It's easy to think you've stumbled into a secret society of three-letter codes and rulebooks.

But behind all that jargon lies a simple goal: moving money securely, instantly, and with as little pain as possible. That's what this guide is about — making sense of the invisible machinery behind every transaction and showing why those tiny blips on a terminal screen are the heartbeat of global commerce.

I'm Richie. I've been in the payments world since 2013, working with teams that design, launch, and scale products to make paying a little smarter, and a lot less painful.