Patrick McKenzie

Biweekly newsletter about intersection of tech and finance. Deep dives into the plumbing that moves money and the businesses that build those pipes.

Visit bam.kalzumeus.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Oct 2021 – Nov 2022

Credit cards make money through net interest, interchange, fees, and marketing contributions.

SWIFT operates a messaging protocol which ties banks together with correspondent banks. This collaboration enables most international wires.

Bank transfers have exploded as a payment method in India and may become more common in much of the world.

Counterintuitively, businesses, customers, and society prefer having fraud to what they'd need to do to not have it.

Leverage is actually reasonably easy to understand, both in the math and in the implications for financial firms.

Debit cards are a core piece of financial infrastructure and drive much of the innovation happening in fintech.

Tech firms and financial institutions, working together, have in the recent past made core financial services much better for consumers.

Fraud is largely conducted by professionals operating in specialized firms, which have their own ecosystem of evil.

Gift cards are a loosely-regulated quasi-financial product and frequently misunderstood. Here's how they operate under the hood.

Mortgages are popularly thought of as loans, but to understand the industry, it's better to model them as complex manufactured products.

How and why small, local banks power the fintech apps you use.

Ever wondered how bank branches work at a nuts-and-bolts level? Let's dig into the logic and economics of them.

Many people believe some transactions are final. The reality is a bit more complicated, and involves technical, social, and legal factors.