How to Build a Payment Gateway
Design and operate a payment gateway the way serious acquirers and PSPs do: clear money movement, strong APIs, operational controls, and compliance-aware architecture—not just a checkout demo.
Format: 2 weeks · instructor-led or self-paced options · certificate of completion · examples from our production builds (Meras, Infinipi, and others).
What you will be able to do
- Map the full payment lifecycle: authorization, capture, void, refund, chargebacks, and settlement windows.
- Design idempotent APIs, webhook signing, replay protection, and reconciliation-friendly event models.
- Choose routing, failover, and MIDs/merchant hierarchy for real portfolios.
- Understand PCI DSS scope reduction, tokenization, and what must never touch your servers.
- Model ledger postings and settlement batches so finance and engineering share one source of truth.
- Prepare for production: monitoring, alerting, incident playbooks, and scheme/network basics.
Syllabus
Week 1 — Architecture, APIs & acquiring fundamentals
- Industry map: issuer, acquirer, scheme, PSP, gateway, merchant; card-not-present vs present.
- Message flows: auth, advice, reversal, clearing & settlement; async vs sync UX.
- API design: REST patterns, idempotency-Key, request correlation, error taxonomy, rate limits.
- Merchant onboarding: KYB hooks, risk tiers, capability flags, settlement profiles.
- Tokenization & vault strategies: network tokens, PSP tokens, PCI boundaries.
- Routing & cascading: BIN rules, cost/health-based routing, geographic rules.
- Webhooks: delivery guarantees, signing (HMAC), retries, dead-letter handling.
Week 2 — Operations, risk, reconciliation & scale
- Settlement files, batching, cut-offs, FX and multi-currency settlement basics.
- Internal ledger & sub-ledger design; available vs pending balances; holds and reserves.
- Reconciliation: acquirer reports, exception queues, unmatched auths, fee schedules.
- Disputes & chargebacks: evidence, representment timelines, issuer communication.
- Fraud signals: velocity, device, 3DS2/SCA decisioning, rules engines vs ML handoff.
- Observability: golden signals, trace IDs across auth path, SLOs for auth latency.
- Capstone: specify APIs + ledger postings + webhook schema for a multi-merchant SaaS biller.
Tools & concepts
Capstone
You produce a gateway specification pack: OpenAPI-style endpoint list, idempotency policy, webhook contract, sample ledger entries for auth/capture/refund, and a reconciliation checklist for day-1 operations.
Who should attend
Backend engineers, payment PMs, technical founders, and ops leads moving from integrations to platform ownership.
Prerequisites
Comfort with HTTP APIs and relational data models. No prior scheme expertise required—we build intuition from first principles.
Apply for this course
Fee $1,800 · 2 weeks. Students receive 50% off with valid ID. We will email payment instructions and next steps after you submit.
Corporate or bulk seats? Contact us. For other courses see all trainings.