Originally posted by filtration
So, I was thinking, is it really this simple:
Structure:
accounts
- bank_id
- account_number
- sort_code
- balanace_id
banks
- id
- name
…. etc
balances
- account_id
- balance
transactions
- account_id
…. etc
Banks register, and only the bank can only access customers where their bank_id is the banks id…. obviously you need to check balances and shit before transactions
Is this all banking is…. would make sense because money is nothing.
Significantly more complicated than that, some of it is incidental to any system that issues credit (e.g. a lot of major financial systems are geological layers on top of cobol systems of record), and some of it is a product of very intricate regulation that no one ever gets quite right.
But in essence yeah, sure, ultimately there is some record somewhere that indicates what the balance on your credit card is, even if the process of computing or updating it is something akin to a Rube Goldberg machine.
Typically it would be the issuer that manages things like account balances, the network (eg visa) facilitates the infrastructure necessary for communication between merchants and issuers, but doesn’t strictly need to care about account details beyond authentication.
