Based on my experience of building several payment gateways, it is my opinion that it's pretty much always "3 lines of code" (which isn't true about this library - more like "3 steps") to post a payment, even to the nastiest acquiring or banking API.
The remaining 675,000 lines of code are to:
- Perform Risk / Fraud scoring to decide whether you want to, indeed, process this payment.
- Deal with the myriad of failure scenarios - including mapping them to your own system's error semantics - in a way that your customers can understand to reduce support calls.
- Refund, void or reverse previous payments.
- Create the necessary accounting entries in order to do settlements / settlement reports for your customers.
- Etcetera
Payments systems are perplexing to me: Nothing is a more obvious candidate for an absolute, standardised, commoditised piece of software in the same way that the global IP network routes packets - only in payments we are routing "promises" and our routes, and routing decisions, are in many ways much simpler.
Yet there are very few industries where this particular wheel gets reinvented as often as it does; each organisation convinced that it has its own unique approach to doing this absolutely standard, regulated "thing" - which, reductio ad absurdum, is just an expensive buffer in a network of pipes.
Hopefully open-source software will pave the way: TigerBeetle is an amazing start (distributed ledgers), and it's hopefully only a matter of time until the other components of a payments switch are freely available as open-source components with high-quality APIs.
The remaining 675,000 lines of code are to:
- Perform Risk / Fraud scoring to decide whether you want to, indeed, process this payment.
- Deal with the myriad of failure scenarios - including mapping them to your own system's error semantics - in a way that your customers can understand to reduce support calls.
- Refund, void or reverse previous payments.
- Create the necessary accounting entries in order to do settlements / settlement reports for your customers.
- Etcetera
Payments systems are perplexing to me: Nothing is a more obvious candidate for an absolute, standardised, commoditised piece of software in the same way that the global IP network routes packets - only in payments we are routing "promises" and our routes, and routing decisions, are in many ways much simpler.
Yet there are very few industries where this particular wheel gets reinvented as often as it does; each organisation convinced that it has its own unique approach to doing this absolutely standard, regulated "thing" - which, reductio ad absurdum, is just an expensive buffer in a network of pipes.
Hopefully open-source software will pave the way: TigerBeetle is an amazing start (distributed ledgers), and it's hopefully only a matter of time until the other components of a payments switch are freely available as open-source components with high-quality APIs.