Most of us expect money to go where we tell it to. The common mental model of monetary transactions is that money moves at the speed of light. But everything in the world is some kind of engineering, and we rarely think about the systems working behind the scenes.
Yet, having spent much of my career in financial infrastructure, I know that what appears to be a simple transaction can involve a surprisingly complicated network of applications, payment infrastructure, and legacy technology. A 2025 U.S. government report found that 8 out of 11 critical legacy IT systems examined still used outdated programming languages.
