We’ve all had amazing conversations at conferences or meetups where you talk with people until 2AM. Bleary eyed, exhausted but excited, and then from out of the blue, you end up hitting on something so profound that–even in the light of day the next morning–the idea still holds weight, still rings true, is still something that you realize you’re going to need to pay attention to and take action on: quickly.
It’s exactly how I felt after talking with Ahmed Siddiqui, CPO of Branch and author of The Anatomy of the Swipe, the book that finally made it simple to understand the means by which money moves from consumer to merchant and, finally, to bank (along with all the points in between).
I didn’t meet Ahmed in a lobby or a conference bar. We met online, each of us in our respective offices. Not late at night, but in the middle of the afternoon.
That, however, didn’t make our conversation any less poignant or actionable. And for me, it was kind of a big deal because Ahmed was instrumental in helping me to understand the lay of the land in payments before I started at Spreedly.
When I got the job, I asked a few people I know who had been working in Payments of Fintech and, to a person, each recommended The Anatomy of the Swipe.
I’m so glad they did because it made the whole concept of what was happening behind the scenes so simple to understand.
What struck me wasn’t that Ahmed explained how payments worked. It was that he treated the whole thing like a crime scene. Like a forensic audit of the absolute necessities behind moving money.
Tag this assumption. Drag hidden processes into the light. Understand friction, reduce complexity, take behavior and make it actionable.
It’s not a book that tries to impress you with how smart it is, but rather something that gives you the answers in a way that anyone can understand.
All that to say: I’m a fan.
Talking about the future of payments
So when Ahmed and I finally spoke, I had an idea of who he might be: a polished professional with that founder cadence. What I got was, thankfully, a remarkably friendly and upbeat person who, like me, just wanted to have a conversation about the things we’re interested in.
What I wanted to get to was the question of what things are on his mind these days. What does he see as the future of our industry, what’s driving innovation, what’s real and what’s imagined, what things should we keep our eyes on and what should we be weary of as things progress?
It seems to me that Ahmed isn’t interested in payments as a machine, but more that he’s fascinated by what all of this infrastructure makes possible.
The mythology would have us believe that money movement is neutral: it all happens via a set of pipes, rails, plumbing.
The reality, Ahmed points out, is that every design decision shapes who pays fees, who bears risk, and who has recourse.
Understanding that makes it easier to see why the U.S. system can sometimes feel incremental and cautious. Stability is prioritized over transformation and legacy rails still dominate.
But step outside the U.S., and the story looks very different. In some countries, the legacy card era has been skipped entirely. They’ve got different infrastructure.
They skipped the progression of dial-up to ADSL and cable and all that went with it and went right to wireless infrastructure where people use phones more than computers. And where people need other options outside of credit cards to make purchases online.
Governments and central banks asked a simple question: why not build payments as public infrastructure, designed for everyone from the start? Ahmed points to Brazil and India as examples.
“In other parts of the world, the whole card-based payment… they’ve skipped it all together,” he says. Brazil’s Pix and India’s UPI aren’t just flashy fintech apps — they’re national payment networks built from the ground up with scale, speed, and inclusion in mind. “[The] majority of people are moving away from cash… frictionless commerce is in a lot of these non-US countries.”
Pix and UPI show what happens when design choices are intentional, ambitious, and aligned with human behavior.
Real-time, near-zero-cost transfers, mass adoption (almost 90% of the adult population of Brazil uses Pix!), and systems that scale nationally.
The adoption didn’t crawl: it detonated.
And the consequences? Immense opportunity, but also giant gaps in trust and accountability, whether they be real or perceived. Fraud, scams, and AI-driven attacks become harder to ignore when money moves this fast.
Ah yes, we can’t have a conversation about the future of payments without involving Artificial Intelligence.
For all the buzz about AI and where agentic commerce is headed, Ahmed is clear-eyed about the hype.
As we discuss what all of this means for payments, I’m getting that Ahmed believes AI and agentic commerce aren’t inherently dangerous. The caveat being that premature deployment carries risk.
The systems aren’t self-regulating; intent, authorization, and accountability have to be built in at every step of this infrastructure. The businesses who manage to drive adoption are probably not going to emerge by pushing faster bots, but by designing systems that protect users and merchants while enabling innovation.
“This is gonna be really interesting to watch… outside of people who do what we do, who’s even heard the term agentic?” Ahmed laughs. “It sounds Greek. Literally.” And yet, he remains constructive: these technologies have a future, but this future needs to be shaped intentionally.
“How do we know that this is truly an intended transaction?” he asks as we chat about using AI chat to make purchases. “Because what’s going to end up happening is that the card networks need to protect the merchants, because otherwise you’d have all these huge losses.”
Ahmed stresses the human element repeatedly. “It’s the action step, isn’t it?... I have to [make a decision].” That step—the actual step that a consumer takes to approve a transaction, to say “I want this thing”—is where trust and accountability live.
And that is going to be a huge element behind the adoption of those systems. There’s just no way around it.
Without it, “there’s gonna have to be a lot in place in order to make sure that those things happen the way the consumer wants it to be, or the consumer’s not gonna have trust in that process.”
Ahmed believes human engagement still matters—may even be more important than ever.
“Agentic AI does have the potential to generate more sales, but that doesn’t matter if the majority of those sales aren’t legitimate. That would just end up costing merchants even more money and add to their fraud losses.”
The philosophy is simple: preparation, not reaction. Trust, not speed. Accountability, not convenience. The industry can choose to shape these systems or be shaped by them.
It’s a lot to take in. And our time is short and we have to move on.
Because what I really wanted to talk about was Ahmed’s new book.
The Evolution of the Swipe
If The Anatomy of the Swipe was Ahmed’s first broadcast out into an industry that didn’t know it needed this remarkably foundational document, then his new book feels like a conversation with an industry that’s finally got its ears open.
But it’s one he doesn’t want to be the only one speaking in. He’s hesitant to call it prescriptive or definitive. Instead, he keeps using the word collaborative.
For once, someone using that word uses it properly: not marketing speak, but an actual account of how this next project is unfolding.
“It’s very different than last time,” he says. This project isn’t starting from zero; it’s starting from a place where thousands of people have written to him privately over the years, thanking him for making the world of payments simple to understand.
Now he wants to open the door rather than explain from behind it.
As Ahmed tells it, the genesis for this book, titled The Evolution of the Swipe, came from two forces colliding: a realization that the payments landscape has changed faster than most people realize, and a persistent itch to confront the assumptions the industry keeps recycling.
“The first book did a good job at laying out the core, core foundation of payments,” he told me, echoing a point from our earlier conversation. “But the way in which you and I interact with merchants is quite a bit different now. Nobody is swiping.”
Which is almost an understatement. Maybe even exactly an understatement.
We now tap, click, scan, order online, pick up at curbside, let AI populate our carts, authenticate with biometrics. And we do all this without ever physically touching a card.
It’s a depth of integration payments has never had before, a place where money moves inside ecosystems that know far more about us than the average terminal ever did.
Ahmed saw this shift early. He saw the digitalization of payments as more than novelty. Like us, he sees a fundamental rearchitecting of a system that touches every consumer every day.
The problem was that there was no single text that met that moment. What existed was either dense academic treatment or narrow technical manuals.
There was nothing that connected infrastructure to lived experience, that explained not just how payments work, but what it means when they become invisible, ambient, potentially, agent‑driven.
That realization planted the seed for his second book.
Obviously, the world has changed since he wrote his first book. The audience isn’t just his internal team anymore. It’s the broader community of people living with these systems: developers, risk teams, merchants, fintech founders, regulators, students, and even curious laypeople who want to understand how a dollar can move across continents in milliseconds.
And people like me who want to have a better idea of what’s changing and how those changes affect merchants and consumers alike.
The swipe evolves, and so does the process
This time, Ahmed is doing it differently.
Instead of writing in isolation, Ahmed has been publishing draft chapters in public, soliciting feedback on structure, clarity, and relevance. He’s calling it a collaborative draft process, and he’s serious about that word.
I was lucky enough to be able to be invited to be involved in the process and it’s been fascinating to follow along.
The conversations these chapters have sparked range from technical critique to philosophical pushback to structural suggestions he hadn’t thought of himself.
Ahmed isn’t shying away from this input; he’s inviting it.
“I really feel like this book should be a lot more collaborative than the first time around,” he explains. “It’s not just about getting feedback on content: it’s about letting the community shape the way the material is presented so it’s actually useful.”
Ahmed tells me that he chose this approach because the stakes are higher now. The systems he writes about are changing rapidly, and even experts are learning in real time.
Waiting until a book is “done” would risk publishing material that is already out of sync with the latest trends, failures, and innovations. By opening up the editing process, he can incorporate diverse expertise as he goes, making the work more accurate, more grounded, and more immediately relevant. It’s a radical kind of transparency for a field that often hides its complexity behind jargon.
On a practical level, that means the book will likely be less linear than most industry texts. He’s talking about stories, use cases, structural critiques, and illustrated guides, not just exposition and definitions.
That’s where his illustrator comes in: he’s brought the same artist who contributed to the first book back on board, with instructions to push boundaries. Not stock diagrams, but images that tell stories, that make abstract systems feel tactile and real.
As we wrap up our conversation, one thing becomes clear: Ahmed has a strong belief that the future of payments should be shaped, not endured; molded, not tolerated; guided, not left to chance.
Reacting after the fact leaves the industry chasing its own tail, perpetually behind the curve.
Engaging deliberately, questioning assumptions, and designing with trust baked in is how systems evolve to serve both merchants and consumers. And this is what this is all about, anyway.
Maybe the most important insight Ahmed would leave you with is this: the future isn’t just a set of technologies or innovations to adopt. It’s a set of human, intentional, and ethical choices that determine whether these systems empower people or leave them to navigate the consequences on their own.
The question, then, is really not about whether or not payments will evolve. It's whether we, collectively, will evolve with them.
To learn more about Branch, visit https://www.branchapp.com.
