The Payments Engineer Playbook

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How Modern Treasury Invented Event Locking
Race conditions are the nastiest problem in money software. They've forced engineers to make wrong design choices. Not anymore.
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Alvaro Duran
2
Payment for Payment Flow: How revenue sharing agreements impact payment orchestration
Markets that compete on volume often share some of their revenue with their intermediaries
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Alvaro Duran
Apple Pay as a Digital Check
Adopting modern encryption to credit card payments
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Alvaro Duran

October 2024

Dynamic Linking, and the limitations of 2FA in Payments
Authentication is what matters when money movement is centralized. But figuring out who you are is a process where you are the weakest link.
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Alvaro Duran
Exemptions and Data Science: The European Way of Building 3DS
When to hedge fraud risk, and when not to, in the land of strict regulation.
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Alvaro Duran
1
The Customer Must Never Know: The American Way of Building 3DS
3DS is the great equalizer for online payments. But in the US, it is not mandatory. This has more significance than you might expect for engineers.
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Alvaro Duran
How to design mixed payment methods with store credits
Scaling a convenient alternative to cash refunds sows the seeds for a multi-method payment system, and a sophisticated loyalty program
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Alvaro Duran
6
The Payments Engineer Playbook Is Going Paid in 2025—Here's What You Need to Know
Level up your expertise in payments systems and support the ongoing publication of this newsletter.
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Alvaro Duran

September 2024

Why Payments Engineers Should Avoid State Machines
Event-driven money software is replayable and pull-based. Why are state machines still prevalent in payments?
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Alvaro Duran
1
An Approach To Ledgers That Makes Multi-Currency Not Just Possible, But Easy
Or "How To Embed Everything Into Finance"
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Alvaro Duran
1
Engineers Do Not Get To Make Startup Mistakes When They Build Ledgers
Practical accounting for fintech engineers, and also how not to repeat my silly mistakes.
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Alvaro Duran
4
The Most Important Book In Payments Is a Data Systems Book
Challenging the belief that good software design isolates business concerns on the domain layer.
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Alvaro Duran
© 2024 Alvaro Duran Barata
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