Books:
- A Piece of the Action by Joe Nocera. This book describes the history of financial innovation in the US through the big names of the last 50 years, such as Fidelity, Charles Schwab, and Visa.
- Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance
- Payment Systems in the US by Glenbrook. This is a textbook overview of how wires, ACH, checks, and credit cards work and the pros and cons of each.
- Money: The True Story of a Made up thing
- The Anatomy of the Swipe: Making Money Move by Ahmed Siddiqui.
- The Most Fun I Never Want To Have Again: A Mid-Life Crisis in Community Banking. An excellent book about community banking.
- Invested: Changing Forever the Way Americans Invest by Charles Schwab (a memoir).
- The Man Who Solved the Market
- Lying for Money
Podcasts and Videos:
- The Invisible Plumbing of Our Economy by Planet Money. This episode describes how money actually moves through the ACH system using the illustrative example of trying to get money deposited after a Kickstarter campaign.
- The Cost of Getting Your Money Back by Planet Money. This episode describes the returns process for ACH payments through the experience of trying to revoke an accidental Venmo payment.
- Overview of Credit Cards by Khan Academy. This video gives an overview of credit rails and the visuals help explain how the money flows.
- Why are we all paying a tax to credit card companies? By Ryan Cooper at The Week. The article is about the history of the six pillars of the American payments system (cash, checks, credit cards, debit cards, wires, and ACH).
Articles I enjoyed:
Blogs:
Articles:
- Avoiding Double Payments in a Distributed Payments System (2019)
- Measuring Transactional Integrity in Airbnb’s Distributed Payment Ecosystem (2018)
- Tracking the Money — Scaling Financial Reporting at Airbnb (2017)
- Scaling Airbnb's Payment Platform (2016)
- Anomaly Detection for Airbnb's Payment Platform (2015)
- Large Scale Payment Systems and Ruby on Rails (2015)
- Testing at Airbnb (2014)
- Maintaining Quality at Scale (2014)
- Interning with the Airbnb Payments Team
- Secret Ingredients to building Airbnb's International Payments Platform (2013)
Talks:
- Insights from TransferWise and Airbnb | Building Payments | Airbnb, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUvNRZO3A_k (2016)
- Episode 129: The Engineering of Payments (Ian Logan) http://giantrobots.fm/129 (2015)
- Open Air Tech Talk: Going Global: Getting International Users Paid | Airbnb, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txzlKGL3Kpo (2015)
- Open Air Tech Talk: Payments on a Global Scale https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2zRtQJX8oM (2014)
- How ACH Works: A Developer's Perspective by Gusto engineering. A four-part blog series about the technical aspects of ACH money movement and the difficulty of integrating to your corporate bank.