CEO Fraud knowbe4.com

A billing team responsible for collecting payment is prey to this kind of fraud, in which the CEO is impersonated to commend exceptional payment transactions.

Pricing niche products kevinlynagh.com

“The most compelling argument against simply picking a price, though, is that it limits how much you can learn about your market.” Then the author setup vickrey auctions to discover price.

Customized Regression Model for Airbnb Dynamic Pricing kdd.org

This paper describes the pricing strategy model deployed at Airbnb.

20 years of payment processing problems kaimi.io

A huge collection of everything that went wrong, and still is, with payment APIs from the past 2 decades. Any issue exposed in this article that gets unaddressed will end up as stolen money.

The coupon code is a slap in the face justinjackson.ca

Point the negative consequences of users encountering a blank coupon field without having a coupon. See the update at the end of the article with research backing up this anecdote.

Thinking about growth and profit jlongster.com

Discuss the relationship between investments, profit and growth, and how it influence decisions on pricing, free trials and plan structure.

Invoice Security Vulnerabilities invoice.secvuln.info

European Union introduced a "standard" in XML format, which comes with a set of security vulnerabilities.

Never Use Floats for Money husobee.github.io

“This is precisely the problem we have when trying to represent 10^-1, or 0.1 in binary. There is not an exact binary representation of 0.1 or 0.01.”

The Eternal Cost Savings Of Netflix's Internal Spot Market highscalability.com

When you're big enough that creating an internal secondary market for instances makes economic sense.

Dynamic Cloud Pricing for Revenue Maximization henryhxu.github.io

“Amazon's spot price is unlikely to be set according to market supply and demand. Rather, price oscillates within a very narrow band most of the time, which is more likely to be an artifact of some pricing algorithm with predetermined reserve price.”

Jim Barksdale hbr.org

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Startup growth calculator growth.tlb.org

Simple yet effective interactive profitability calculator for startups.

GnuCash Tutorial and Concepts Guide gnucash.org

A complete tutorial on personal finance tracking with GnuCash.

Tazama github.com

🆓 Open-source real-time transaction monitoring software for fraud and money laundering detection, governed by the Tazama Linux Foundation project. This is just an engine to define rules, weight them, and apply them to transactions. There is nothing specific to payments or…

RTB4Free github.com

🆓 Apache-2.0 OpenRTB 2.0-compliant bidder and Demand Side Platform (DSP). Largely dormant since late 2022, but the only OSS DSP reference in this niche.

Papers we love: Auctions and Bidding github.com

A collection of papers on bidding and auctions.

moov github.com

🆓 Suite of Apache-2.0 libraries for financial technology, including moov-io/ach, iso8583, and watchman. No paid product on top.

Mojaloop Fraud Risk Management github.com

🆓 Concrete AML rule implementations from the Mojaloop Foundation: transaction mirroring (90-100% amount-match window), multi-tier payee-graph traversal for layering detection, account-dormancy reactivation, large-transaction-payer, new-payee-transfer. Repo is archived but the…

Fintech Open Source Foundation github.com

🆓 Linux Foundation project hosting open-source projects for financial services.

Samsung's online ads platform/exchange war story github.com

How to scale to 5M bid request/s, 2ms Max Response Time.

GCP billing news gcpweekly.com

From the unofficial Google Cloud Platform newsletter.

How I Stopped a Credit Card Thief From Ripping Off 3,537 People – and Saved Our Nonprofit in the Process freecodecamp.org

Describe a fraud technique known as "card testing", in which massive batch of stolen cards are checked for their validity against your API.

Reproducible Machine Learning for Credit Card Fraud detection fraud-detection-handbook.github.io

A practical handbook on how to identify patterns in transactions.

What is FinOps finops.org

A framework for tech finance and business leadership teams to share the same language and processes of cloud operations and management.

Hacking Scooters: How I Created $100k Worth Of Free Rides fant.io

A cautionary tale on how promo codes can be exploited to get unlimited free rides.

How to project customer retention faculty.wharton.upenn.edu

A seminal paper, with a stronger approach compared to the one above: the exponential distributions is replaced by a geometric model, which is better suited to discrete time intervals like monthly contracts, the former being more appropriate to continuous time process.

European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group - Horror Stories eusprig.org

A collection of cases in which uncontrolled and untested spreadsheet models led to lost revenue, mispricing, poor decision making, fraud and systemic financial failure.

Council Directive 2006/112/EC eur-lex.europa.eu

European Union reference on the common system of VAT.

Council Directive 2016/1065 as regards the treatment of vouchers eur-lex.europa.eu

European directive on the application of VAT when vouchers are involved.

Vickrey auction en.wikipedia.org

Hinted by an HN comment, in which yes, “‘Asking people what they'd pay for and how much rarely works.’ (…) Using a Vickrey auction, similar to Google's ad auction mechanism, can elicit a person's maximum willingness-to-pay.”

Van Westendorp's Price Sensitivity Meter en.wikipedia.org

PSM is a market technique for determining consumer price preferences. Allows for drawing a revenue curve to estimate the price point delivering the maximum revenue.

Universal Business Language en.wikipedia.org

Most invoicing software can read and write UBL documents (XML) for data transfer.

Superman III en.wikipedia.org

The 1983 film in which Gus Gorman, a laid-off clerk who retrains as a programmer, embezzles from his employer's payroll by skimming the fractions of a cent it rounds down.

Riemann sum en.wikipedia.org

The starting point about quantization of usage.

RFM (customer value) en.wikipedia.org

A refined model of CLV, used to segment users based on Recency, Frequency and Monetary value.

Orbitera en.wikipedia.org

GCP's billing subsidiary.

Huber loss en.wikipedia.org

“A loss function used in robust regression, that is less sensitive to outliers in data than the squared error loss.”

Gabor–Granger method en.wikipedia.org

Used in surveys to determine the price for a new product or service. The results can be used to produce a demand chart and a revenue curve.

EPC QR code en.wikipedia.org

EU standard for QR codes used to transfer money between bank accounts via SEPA.

Credit note en.wikipedia.org

Because an invoice is immutable, the only way to fully or partially cancel it is to produce a credit note.

Benford's law en.wikipedia.org

Digit distribution can be a signal of accounting fraud.

Allen's interval algebra en.wikipedia.org

Implementing usage-based pricing is tricky, and this algebra will help you organize temporal reasoning. Also see this Stack Overflow question with clean schema.

Address Verification System en.wikipedia.org

A system checking the matching of customer's billing addresses with the one associated with the credit card.

£sd computing en.wikipedia.org

The IBM 1401 mainframe (1959) optionally supported pounds/shillings/pence (£sd) currency arithmetics in hardware.

Electropedia: Tariffs for electricity electropedia.org

Before the cloud, there was another metered resource priced by its usage: electricity. Here is a detailed (and multi-lingual) taxonomy of its vocabulary from the International Electrotechnical Commission.

Personalised pricing and EU law econstor.eu

Some cases of price personalisation are prohibited in EU due to consumer protection and data protection rules.

EC2Instances.info ec2instances.info

💸 Easy Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison. Operated by Vantage as a free lead-gen surface for its commercial FinOps platform.

EU eInvoicing ec.europa.eu

European standard on electronic invoice.

So, you want to learn Bookkeeping! dwmbeancounter.com

Focus on the daily operations of recording and maintaining the transactions of a business.

Optimizing payments with machine learning dropbox.tech

Describes a classic payment workflow, then how machine learning can replace hard-coded business rules and fine-tune the payment failures/retries loop to increase the success rates of charges.