Put at its simplest, a payment is a bilateral transaction in which money moves between parties in exchange for goods or services. The ‘payment’ has been at the heart of how societies work since our tribal origins and has been essential to economies for more than seven millennia, which is roughly how long we’ve been using metal coins to represent fiscal value. The idea of physical money is so fundamental to the way humans interact that authors of ‘The Pay Off’ (Elliott & Thompson, £16.99, ISBN 9781783965847), Natasha de Terán and Gottfried Leibbrandt, argue that it is part of a triumvirate of key abstractions that enable societies to function (the other two being religion and writing).
And while over time we’ve devised ever more sophisticated ways of moving money around, the most explosive developments have arrived with the digital revolution, our current era in which innovation is in the hands of the ‘smartest brains’ whose job is to make paying...