
The 3 Second Sandwich: How do card networks work? - jhuckestein
https://getmondo.co.uk/blog/2015/12/02/3-second-sandwich/
======
pbreit
I know we always scoff how how supposedly slow and poorly the payment networks
work but considering they've been pretty solidly transferring trillions of
dollars over the past 60+ years, I think we should give them a little more
credit (no pun). "Real-time" payments are cute but not really all that
necessary in reality.

~~~
tomblomfield
There are opportunities that are lost with a 48hr payment vs something that
notifies/authorises in "real-time" (even if the actual settlement only happens
later).

In particular, if you don't capture geolocation data within a few seconds of a
payment, it becomes irrelevant.

~~~
pbreit
Isn't the 48 hours for settlement but the auths are happening in (near)
realtime?

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
The cool thing is if you have a card that sends push notifications. Because
they go through your bank they often arrive faster at your phone than the
transaction settles on the terminal. I had a magical moment where I saw a
charge on my card before the ticket machine saw it, and then it failed to
print a ticket because it was out of paper and before the error came up, i
already got a push notification that the money was reimbursed. Networks are
fast.

------
the_mitsuhiko
> Approximately 48 hours later, the Card Network (Visa, MasterCard, AmEx etc)
> will group together all the payments from a given time period and send them
> to the Card Issuer as a batch “Presentment” file. There might be thousands
> of payments in this file. At this point, the Card Issuer will debit the
> money from each of its customers’ accounts according to the Presentment file
> and make a bulk payment to the Card Network for the entire Presentment
> amount. In turn, the Card Network will divide up the funds and distribute
> the money back to the appropriate Card Acquirers, who will distribute it to
> their merchants in turn.

As someone who has cards that settle after ~48 hours and cards that reflect
the state of transactions immediately I can clearly state that I heavily
prefer the former. The reason for this is that many transactions are not that
simple and you end up with a ton of spam on your statements.

I like what Lloyds does where it shows transactions not fully settled yet in a
separate section in the panel.

Number26 uses any auth message in the log and it's a nightmare when you travel
and later try to consolidate your bills with your credit card statements.

~~~
andy_ppp
I just got my Mondo pre paid card last Thursday (I am part of the alpha,
somehow). I tend to see the App + Card integration as quite nice because
instead of you looking at your money like a statement, you start to think of
it like a dashboard instead, constantly updating to reflect the most recent
changes in your situation.

It is weird that transactions for the underground start as 20p then randomly
increase to £2.30 (or whatever).

As a computer person I quite like seeing the detail of what's going on with
the clearing process. In the end I think Mondo want to be more mainstream than
for a geek like me (i.e. they removed custom tagging - I wanted to do things
like add tags for when corner shops rip you off and charge you 50p for using
your card)!

The API for their bank looks promising though so if you don't like it you can
just treat them as an API and consolidate everything yourself, maybe.

BTW. Thanks for Flask, I use it every day and it's excellent :-)

~~~
jrcii
I made a GeekTool curl script a few years ago that logs into my bank accounts
and all my recurring services', utilities, and scrapes the balances every 10
minutes so I see my complete financial position on my desktop in near-real
time. The dashboard concept is a good fit for this type of data.

~~~
benten10
I would _love_ to play around with it. The Bank Of America finance tracker SUX
big time, and I don't trust Mint et al. with my data (plus, I want to do tasty
analysis/tracking myself, mmmm).

