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Anatomy of a credit card rewards program
Credit card rewards are mostly funded out of interchange, a fee paid by businesses to accept cards.
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.
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Visit bitsaboutmoney.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Jan 2023 – Feb 2026
Tech Industry & Business 24Society, Policy & Culture 22Security & Privacy 1Crypto & Blockchain 1
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Credit card debt collection
Credit card debt is the waste stream of consumer finance. The debt collection industry ends up being sordid, for complex structural and microeconomic reasons.
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Seeing like a bank
The structural reasons why banks sometimes behave bizarrely in interactions with customers, like forgetting things which customers tell them.
4
The Bond villain compliance strategy
Jurisdictional gamesmanship is a common strategy for crypto businesses. Here is how it worked out for Binance and its CEO. Spoiler: poorly.
5
Banking in uncertain times
We may be in the early stages of a banking crisis: why, what we're doing to avoid it, and what we may not get about it.
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The infrastructure behind ATMs
ATMs are connected to banks by networks which operate little-understood payment rails.
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Debanking (and Debunking?)
Crypto advocates kicked off a recent, somewhat politicized, discussion of debanking. Strap in for scintillating banking compliance trivia.
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Money Laundering and AML Compliance
A brief overview of what money laundering is, what financial institutions do about it, and why.
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Financial systems take a holiday
Ever wondered about what happens when banks are closed or why some apps have operating hours? It's fascinating.
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The business of check cashing
Check cashing, as a business, is a poorly understood "alternative" financial service.
11
A very Chicago gamble
Chicago and Bally's have teamed up in an investment offering.
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Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes
The financial industry has paid tens of billions of dollars in tuition on fraud detection. Here are some observations for investigators with badges, press cards, or GoPros.
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Working Title (Insurance)
Title insurance is grossly overpriced relative to actual risks involved. Why is that?
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Why the CrowdStrike bug hit banks hard
Regulation-induced monocultures meet unfortunate but explicable engineering decisions.
15
Open Banking and Payments Competition
Why the banks really hate fintechs that allow businesses to learn your account number easily.
16
Requiem for a bank loan
A brief retrospective on an attractive product First Republic used to offer, and a wider discourse on the banking crisis.
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The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero (2022)
Counterintuitively, businesses, customers, and society prefer having fraud to what they'd need to do to not have it.
18
Perpetual futures, explained
Crypto’s most popular product offers capital efficiency for professionals, leveraged exposure for the masses, rich yields for market makers — and a poorly understood failure mode.
19
The gift card accountability sink
The gaps scammers exploit in gift cards are the result of deliberate policy tradeoffs.
20
Guys what is wrong with ACATS
Ever transferred assets between brokerages? Impressive, terrifying machinations happened in the background. No cats were harmed.
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Mortgages are a manufactured product (2022)
Mortgages are popularly thought of as loans, but to understand the industry, it's better to model them as complex manufactured products.
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The Long Shadow of Checks
A lot of more modern financial infrastructure follows the paths blazed by checks, at least in the U.S.
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Bank transfers as a payment method (2021)
Bank transfers have exploded as a payment method in India and may become more common in much of the world.
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The business of wallets
How digital wallets work, and how payment costs drive a lot of product decisions inside and around them.