Payment systems are rapidly improving over time, but some things stay the same. The way that money moves through the banking system is message-driven

The Banking System is Async

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2024-09-24 19:00:02

Payment systems are rapidly improving over time, but some things stay the same. The way that money moves through the banking system is message-driven and asynchronous. As a software engineer, understanding how this works at the fundamental level can help guide your product design process and help you build better, more robust software.

If you're familiar with interacting with APIs on the internet, you may expect most API-driven services to provide instantaneous operations. Banking payment systems do not work this way.

As software modernizes and software engineers rebuild software that interfaces with the banking system, it's important to understand how banking rails really work and how to design your products around it.

Most developers are familiar with REST APIs – a two-way protocol that always involves a request and response. Think of it as a two-way communication protocol – the receiving server will always provide a response given a properly formatted request.

Bank payments are message-driven, meaning that they are comprised of one-way messages, either to the bank or from the bank. This is fundamentally different than the REST API architectures most developers are used to.