Introduction to SEPA

Introduction Since the inception of the European Union and the introduction of the EURO currency, there was a big gap as far as payments were concerned. There wasn’t a unified payment method or framework for the unified market. SEPA was created to resolve this problem in the year 2008. What is SEPA? Single Euro Payments Area is a payment scheme...

Misc Payment Concepts

Misc Payment Concepts Now that we have seen how payments and payment processing work in general, we can now move on to understand some payment-related terminologies with some examples. These are crucial to further our understanding of the different payment systems. SWIFT SWIFT stands for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. It is a co-operative of banks that provide the...

Charges and FOREX (FX)

Charges and FX This article will attempt to understand how different charges are collected by the bank during payment processing. Charges are one of the ways banks make money, FX is another. Although FX is a huge topic by itself, we will try to understand it in the context of payment processing. Charges The first point to note is that...

Payment Engines

Payment Engines: I am really excited about this topic as it’s my favorite and the one in which I have the most experience. In this article, we will be discussing a piece of software called “payment engine”. They are part of the bank’s IT ecosystem and they help banks process hundreds of thousands of payments a day seamlessly. In the...

Payments Interview Questions

Common Interview Questions: Now that the payments job market is booming and there are lot of interviews happening, I thought of compiling a list of questions that you might get in an interview. Note: This list is not exhaustive and must be used at the final stage of preparation. Most of these questions were directed at me during my years...

Accounting Entries in Payments

Accounting Entries in Payments As promised in my previous article, in this one we will talk about how money moves from one party to another. Before we start, let me introduce you to a few terms that will be used throughout this article. Debit – Money being taken from your account Memory Aid – When you pay for something your...

Payment Messages

PAYMENT MESSAGES We might be getting ahead of ourselves here. There is a lot to understand about payments before we discuss messages, right?! I have a different view on this. My feeling is that payments could be better understood if we get our basics right about messages. A common man might not have heard about payment messages at all. If...

Parties in a Payment System

Let’s Party Nope!! These are not the parties you very much enjoy with your friends. These are the parties that act as pillars of the financial system. We learned from the introduction that completing a single funds transfer involves several parties. The flow of information and funds happen from one party to another until the funds reach the account of...

WELCOME

Welcome to Payments Domain (Dot) Calm 😊 I am Santosh Rajagopalan, a payment enthusiast. I firmly believe that the best way to learn is by sharing the knowledge I have. My current occupation as a Business Analyst in the software industry has put me on a learning trajectory in Payments domain. Every day there are new software engineers joining this...

INTRODUCTION – FUNDS TRANSFER

FUNDS TRANSFER If you have transferred money online and have wondered “what happens ??” after we enter details of the beneficiary in our internet/mobile banking portals and click on the ‘Submit’ button, then this article is for you. Let us take an example to easily understand money transfers, If JOHN wants to transfer funds to TOM then John needs to...