The Field Guide to Global Payments

Book excerpt: The payments industry is complex and quickly changing. From the origins of card-basedtransactions, to the vast world of digital wallets, to the emerging land of decentralizedfinance and cryptocurrencies, it can be hard to know where to start as a consumer ormerchant better looking to understand how money moves in the twenty-first century.In The Field Guide to Global Payments, payments industry veteran and entrepreneurSophia Goldberg offers a smart, compressive course on payments, covering theevolution of the industry, surveying the current global payments landscape, and lookingforward into emerging payment technologies.The payments industry underpins the entire modern globalized economy. It's hard forsomeone starting off to know what they don't know. With this book, readers will finallyhave access to a high-level overview of this crucial but complex space. This is a bookfor anyone who is either interested in payments or in a role that touches payments -that could be an accounting team who processes payments, someone starting a jobwithin a payments company or payments team, business owners looking to betterunderstand funds flow and subscriptions models from a payments perspective, orexecutives who want to learn more about the mechanics of where much of their revenueliterally comes from.In this day and age, payments should no longer be an afterthought for any merchant ororganization. It's time to dig in and really understand the players and networks throughwhich our money runs.