This is cool, but a part of me has to be flip, and humanity is kind of hilarious to me. All of this amazing infrastructure and hard work to essentially just very carefully and accurately subtract one number from another in a way that makes auditing easy.
mikepurvis•5m ago
"Rebuilding the full payments network from scratch was a significant, multi-year effort. It involves complex processing logic, extensive edge cases, and exception handling."
Quite apart from fraud/abuse prevention, I expect part of this is stuff like juggling all the different rewards and points systems plus handling time-based offers ("spend $x at y retailer by z date, get $10 cash back" type thing) plus ensuring that all those things are correctly unwound in the case of refunds being issued.
As someone who recently got an Amex card (primarily for Air Canada lounge access), I've been impressed at how nice their app is compared to the five previous bank apps I've been exposed to in recent years (Scotia, BMO, RBC, Tangerine, CIBC). Some nice things I noticed that I haven't previously experienced:
- instant alerts on use, even when it was a non mobile pay transaction
- up to the minute transaction history in-app, including Aeroplan point accrual; all my other credit cards have a delay before new items appear.
- an in-app button to debit my bank for the balance without me having to go to my bank's app to send a bill pay.
e-dant•1h ago
A fascinating en dash, used as an em dash, followed by two em dashes.
Hmmm.
alberth•42m ago
Re: transition to micro services (from monolith).
I’m surprised a network so sensitive to latency (as are payment networks), was able to achieve their latency SLAs with micro services.
Maybe Amex being a closed-loop network helps with latency?
mattclarkdotnet•10m ago
Since when were payment networks latency sensitive? It’s usually 2 or more seconds to even get a payment up on the card terminal from the merchant POST system, then 2-5 seconds more from card presentation to getting approval back.
themafia•1h ago
mikepurvis•5m ago
Quite apart from fraud/abuse prevention, I expect part of this is stuff like juggling all the different rewards and points systems plus handling time-based offers ("spend $x at y retailer by z date, get $10 cash back" type thing) plus ensuring that all those things are correctly unwound in the case of refunds being issued.
As someone who recently got an Amex card (primarily for Air Canada lounge access), I've been impressed at how nice their app is compared to the five previous bank apps I've been exposed to in recent years (Scotia, BMO, RBC, Tangerine, CIBC). Some nice things I noticed that I haven't previously experienced:
- instant alerts on use, even when it was a non mobile pay transaction
- up to the minute transaction history in-app, including Aeroplan point accrual; all my other credit cards have a delay before new items appear.
- an in-app button to debit my bank for the balance without me having to go to my bank's app to send a bill pay.