Overview

Title: The Field Guide to Global Payments

Author: Sophia Goldberg

How I learned about it: A post with resources to learn about payment systems, which I found commented on Hacker News

Would I recommend: Yes! This book is very easy to read, and with the table of initialisms I’m providing below, you will have easy reference to the 10000000000 new terms introduced in this book without having to create your own such list as you go. It’s not necessary to retain everything, but you’ll learn a lot just from reading it casually, and you can always come back to it again later if you want to study it in depth.

General comments

(Note: I read this book in May 2023 & wrote this review shortly after, but I didn’t get around to publishing it until now.)

The Field Guide to Global Payments is a great intro text to a sector of the economy that’s filled with a ton of terms (see the next section), processes, concepts, entities (see the next section), and ideas. It’s easy to read, clear, and not too long. I highly recommend reading it to anyone who likes to spend time on Hacker News or just to read the news as payments come up all the time, and you probably never noticed it before. Rather, maybe there were some random unfamiliar terms you didn’t notice, so your brain glossed over them, and you kept reading. After you read this book, you’ll be able to follow the conversation and perhaps even begin to have an opinion.

It’s certainly not a perfect book. Most importantly, there is no glossary of abbreviations. To that end, I have created one for you! The next section is an alphabetical table of initialisms. It contains the initialism, what it stands for (plus a link to Wikipedia if I could find one), and the first page number on which it’s discussed. Sometimes I put a second page number too, if it came up again much later in the text. Now you can have a glossary to refer to as you read the book, hooray! Feel free to print this up if you want, or open it on your phone so you can make use of the Wikipedia links.

Table of Initialisms

Yes, I’m someone who uses “initialism” and “acronym” non-interchangeably. Sorry.

Conclusion

Whew, that was a lot of typing to make this table happen, so please read this book and find it useful. Okay thanks. And a call to action isn’t complete without a link, so once again The Field Guide to Global Payments.