FinTech, Digital Payments, and Open Banking

Your payment product moves money from one account to another. But which rail? Why not just use cards? How do you keep fraud out without blocking legitimate customers? What does your compliance team actually need from you? This course teaches you the real machinery of modern payments, not just the fintech hype. You'll learn the rails — ACH, cards, real-time systems, SWIFT, stablecoins — and when to choose each one, because the choice is never "objectively best"; it's always a trade-off. Faster settlement means harder fraud detection. Lower cost means you accept longer delays. Open banking gives you access to bank data, but it requires licensing and compliance. You'll trace a payment end-to-end: from initiation through authorization, routing, settlement, and reconciliation. You'll understand why a cross-border wire takes three days and costs money you can't see. You'll design a digital wallet and decide: does your fintech hold the customer's funds (higher regulatory burden, lower fraud risk) or just connect them to their bank (lighter regulation, customer owns the keys)? You'll map the regulatory landscape — Federal Reserve, OCC, FinCEN, PSD2, PCI DSS — and understand who oversees what and why. Running through every lesson is the honest answer to "why does this exist?": every mechanism solves a real problem (speed, cost, access, security) and embeds a real constraint (fraud-detection latency, regulatory compliance, liquidity requirement, customer friction). By the end you can design a payment architecture, evaluate a fintech vendor, assess the fraud and compliance risks in a flow, and explain the trade-offs honestly — not as a consultant selling you a solution, but as someone who understands what you're actually choosing. No prior fintech knowledge required. Math beyond arithmetic is not needed. Just the willingness to understand how money actually moves in the real world — and why fintechs make the choices they do.