Although brief and US-specific, this books gives a good overview: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36055478-payments-systems-in-the-u-s https://www.goodreads

Although brief and US-specific, this books gives a good overview: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36055478-payments-systems-in-the-u-s https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36055478-payments-system... As a spoiler, most of these institutions communicate by exchanging text files over SFTP or similar. As for Blockchain, I'd start with Satoshi's Bitcoin paper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf Disclaimer: I work at Stripe.