During my first job, I was looking at the organization’s technical architecture. And saw that we had multiple databases set up. We had MySQL databases, Hive and Hadoop. From the surface, they all seem the same to me. As a user, you would enter the SQL language to access the data. I wondered why we didn’t just use MySQL database for everything. Why go through all the trouble of setting up Hive and Hadoop. After digging deeper, I started to understand the difference between traditional databases ( MySQL ) and data warehouses ( Hive + Hadoop )and the concept of OLTP and OLAP. Here I would like to elaborate on my learnings.

Cross-border payments represent one-sixth of total transaction values, its revenues total up to $200 billion globally ( Mckinsey Report ). This is split roughly evenly between transaction fees and foreign exchange (FX) revenues. This equates to 27 percent of global transaction revenues and is increasing by 6 percent annually. Currently cross-border payments are still slow and has a hefty transaction fees. Try out this Western Union price estimator. To send 100 dollars from the US to Taiwan would take 4 business days and 15 dollars in transaction fee. In this blog post, I will try to give a high-level intro to how cross-border payment system works.

Stripe is a payment API company that is founded by Irish entrepreneur brothers John and Patrick Collison. Stripe has became extremely popular by building a payment infrastructure that is developer centric. Its customers include companies such as Shopify and Lyft.