What payments taught me about trust

Payments looks like technology from the outside. Up close it is almost entirely judgement: deciding who to stand behind, how much risk to carry on their behalf, and what to do on the day something goes wrong. The software is the easy part.

The part nobody sees

Underwriting a merchant in a regulated category means asking questions nobody enjoys answering, then deciding anyway. Get it wrong in one direction and you fund fraud. Get it wrong in the other and you decline a legitimate business that has already been declined everywhere else. Most of the industry solves this by saying no by default. That is not a strategy, it is an absence of one.

Being dependable is not a feature of the product. In payments it is the entire product.