Rails
Instant settlement, ISO 20022, and the unglamorous infrastructure that moves the world’s money.
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In this issue
The Last Mile of Real-Time Payments
Priya MenonInstant rails are live in forty countries. The hard part was never the transfer.
ISO 20022 and the Great Message Migration
Devin RaoA decade-long schema change, and what it bought everyone.
What a Ledger Taught a Generation of Engineers
Lena VogelDouble-entry bookkeeping is six hundred years old and still the best distributed systems primer we have.
Card Networks Are Not the Enemy
Omar HaddadInterchange is expensive. It also buys things that account-to-account payments still have not replicated.
Inside a Core Banking Migration
Sarah LindqvistFour years, three false starts, and one weekend that decided everything.
The Economics of a Basis Point
Ravi IyerAt scale, one hundredth of a percent is a business model.
Why Reconciliation Is Still Manual
Maya OkonkwoSomewhere in every fintech, a spreadsheet is load-bearing.
A Conversation with a Payments Architect
Nadia FaroukTwenty years of moving money, told over a very long coffee.
Open Banking’s Awkward Adolescence
Tomas AlvarezMandated APIs arrived. The products took much longer.
Fraud at the Speed of Instant
Hannah ColeIrreversible payments changed the attacker’s economics overnight.