About Payments Guild

Why this exists

Most people in payments learned the industry the same way: on the job, in fragments, from whoever happened to sit nearby. The systems themselves — authorisation, clearing, settlement, interchange, the economics that decide who earns what on every transaction — are coherent and learnable, but the material explaining them is scattered across scheme manuals, vendor marketing, and folklore. The gap is widest in the markets growing fastest.

Payments Guild is an attempt to close that gap: a structured curriculum that starts from first principles and builds to scheme economics, written by a practitioner, grounded in the markets most courses skip, and free. Around the school sits the rest of the guild hall — a daily briefing on the industry and a map of who does what across 58 markets.

The author

Dinakaran Balaji

Founder — Payments Guild

Dinakaran Balaji has spent over a decade inside the payments industry — in scheme relations with Visa and Mastercard, interchange and pricing strategy, and cards issuing and acquiring at a regional payments processor. Payments Guild is the course he wishes had existed when he started: the one that explains not just what happens when a card is tapped, but who pays whom, why the fee is what it is, and where the system is heading.

Independence

Payments Guild is a personal project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or a product of any employer, card scheme, or company named on this site. No confidential, proprietary, or client information appears anywhere in the curriculum, simulators, or directory. Where companies are named, the information is public. Nothing here represents the views of any organisation the author works with or for.

Sources & method

Every chapter is built from public materials — scheme public rules and glossaries, EMVCo and ISO specifications, central bank and regulator publications, PCI Security Standards Council documents — combined with the author's own working experience of how these systems behave in practice. All rates, fee tables, and worked examples across the site are illustrative and invented for teaching: real interchange and scheme fee schedules are confidential, vary by market, and change over time. If you spot an error, the Guild wants to know.