The book presents information on the methods of payment acceptance and types of payments existing in the modern Internet business, financial instruments and their integration, top-up /withdrawal of funds within the payment systems.
Why I read it: I already have several years of experience working as a software engineer in digital payments. Want to start adding theoretical background to the understanding I’ve gained via my work.
What I liked about it: - It was easy to read. - It improved my understanding of concepts like issuing bank and acquirer and the overview of the card payment flow. - Before reading this book, I have never thought about disadvantages of working with physical money like the costs of securely transferring them between locations. I just took the move to cashless societies for granted. - I got a little ego boost as a lot of stuff in this book was already familiar to me.
What I disliked: - The book is very broad, structured as rather short chapters on different topics, so there was no feeling of continuous read. - The book is written for an entrepreneur who needs to choose the correct payment options for a new product. I was expecting a more generic technical overview. - Majority of examples were from Eastern Europe, it would have been more exciting to read about payment systems I’ve worked with.
This is like a course of digital payments. For sure, if you have no experience with the theme it will be a good reading. For me, I learned just few things, but important ones. Also, this book has examples in Europe context that are a bit different from the context here in Brazil.
At the end of the book you'll have knowledge of the main actors involved in a payment. Was expecting to go into more details on the technical side of PSPs but maybe it was not in the scope of the book(understandable)
Learnt a great deal about payment methods and flows, however, very biased towards Eastern Europe rather than the mainstream. It was interesting but chaotically written with little contiguous flow. It feels very stitched together. The book is a good introduction, just not well collated.