Fintech Lab
Lesson 9State and lifecycleIntermediate
A purchase is three ledger events
Auth, capture, and settle each touch your books differently.

A customer pays you ₦5,000 via card. What your code calls 'a transaction' is actually three separate ledger events spanning two days. The provider authorizes the card now, captures the funds when you fulfill the order, then settles cash to your bank tomorrow. Every fintech engineer eventually realizes their refund logic is broken because they treated this as atomic. Watch all three.

Fintech Lab is a free, interactive lab for fintech engineers. Real ledger, your own sandbox, engineering patterns from production. See all 85 lessons.

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