How Payments Work

Artem Smirnov is a product leader specializing in card issuing, payments, and fintech infrastructure. For more than a decade, he has worked on payment products across Europe, Asia, and Latin America. His experience spans con-sumer and commercial card programs, including debit, credit, prepaid, and corporate products, as well as lending and loyalty products, digital wallets, buy now, pay later, Card-as-a-Service platforms, and large card-portfolio mi-grations. His work has involved banks, fintech companies, processors, and the Visa and Mastercard networks, giving him experience with the technical and operational details of transaction processing, tokenization, fraud controls, ac-counting, and regulatory requirements.Much of what he knows about payments was learned through real projects, difficult integrations, and production problems that rarely fit neatly into pro-vider documentation. He wrote this book to make that knowledge easier to ac-quire and to help readers understand not only how payment systems work, but why they are designed the way they are.