In the opaque and jargon heavy world of financial technology, a peculiar phenomenon has occurred over the last few years. If you walk into the onboarding sessions of giants like Visa, Stripe, or Block, you are likely to find new hires clutching the same paperback. It is not a textbook written by an Ivy League economist or a technical manual produced by a card network. It is The Anatomy of the Swipe. A labour of love written in evenings and weekends by payments executive Ahmed Siddiqui. “I didn’t set out to write an industry bible,” Siddiqui admits. “I wrote it selfishly. I had a team of 35 people at a startup who didn’t know how money moved, and I needed them to learn.”
Five years later, Siddiqui is preparing to do it again. His sequel, The Evolution of the Swipe, is slated for release in May 2026. While his first book dissected the legacy infrastructure of cards and terminals, the new book tackles how the landscape has fundamentally shifted.
His journey offers a masterclass for business leaders on how to develop a personal brand, how to find the time to write a book while working full time and raising a family, and how to successfully self-publish an Amazon bestseller.
For more like this on Forbes, What Payment Professionals Need To Know About Agentic Commerce.
How The Book Came To Be
Siddiqui started his career in fintech back in 2014 when he was hired as VP of Product Management at Marqeta, where he spent four years building issuer processing infrastructure from the ground up. That was where he truly learned the craft.
Thinking he was ready to leave the payments industry behind, he relocated to Minnesota to be closer to his family. He joined workforce payments platform Branch, which at the time was a workplace scheduling app.
However, during user interviews, a different need emerged. While employees liked managing their shifts online, their actual pain point was liquidity. They were waiting too long to get paid. Siddiqui realized he could solve this by offering early access to earned wages.
Branch pivoted hard to become a payments platform, but they faced an immediate problem. The team consisted of experts in scheduling, not financial infrastructure. None of them knew how money actually moved. Siddiqui decided to write down the knowledge he had accumulated over the years to train his internal team. That training manual would eventually become The Anatomy of the Swipe.
For more like this on Forbes, When Payments Become Strategy, Not Just Plumbing.
The Power of “Stick Figure” Strategy
The breakthrough for the book’s accessibility came from an unlikely source. It was his editor, Cass. “She didn’t come from the world of payments,” Siddiqui says. “She was reading my draft and told me it didn’t make sense. She asked if I could draw it.”
A self-confessed visual learner, Siddiqui began sketching the complex flow of transaction messages using simple stick figures. When Cass saw the drawings, the concepts finally made sense, and she urged him to make more of these visual explanations.
Taking that advice to heart, Siddiqui hired a professional artist to translate his rough sketches into polished diagrams. This decision proved to be the differentiator that turned a dry training guide into an industry favorite. By making abstract concepts into digestible visuals, the book didn’t just explain the code; it visualized the invisible conversation between the stakeholders involved in a card transaction, making the “black box” of payments accessible to everyone from engineers to salespeople.
The Zero Budget GTM
The book was released in April 2020 during the peak of the COVID 19 pandemic. Siddiqui had no grand marketing plan. He anticipated selling perhaps 35 copies, mostly to his own team members. “I wasn’t planning on making money. I just wanted the knowledge to exist,” he says. Then the LinkedIn messages started.
“I started getting notes from people at Visa, Stripe and Block saying they were using this book for their onboarding,” Siddiqui says. Without a PR firm or an ad spend, the book had found its audience.
The Go To Market strategy was effectively “radical utility.” By simplifying a complex topic that every fintech company needed to teach but no one wanted to document, Siddiqui created a resource that marketed itself. It solved a specific pain point for hiring managers across the industry.
The Operator Author Model
Perhaps the most compelling aspect of Siddiqui’s success is that he remains a full time employee, he is still building products at Branch. “I love teaching, but to stay relevant, I need to be a practitioner,” Siddiqui asserts.
This “Operator Author” model adds a layer of credibility that pure academics lack, but it comes at a cost. Siddiqui writes in the margins of life. This happens in the early mornings before the school run and late nights after his three children are asleep.
He utilizes a hybrid publishing model. He works with a publisher that allows him to retain creative control while utilizing crowdfunding to pay for high quality editing and design. It is an entrepreneurial approach to publishing that treats the book like a startup product. You build a prototype draft, validate it with users via community pre reads, and fund it via customers through crowdfunding.
The Evolution of the Swipe
The landscape has shifted dramatically since 2020 so now Siddiqui is turning his attention to the future. We have moved from dipping chips to tapping phones. “The world has evolved,” Siddiqui notes. “We are seeing the tokenization of everything. The lines are blurring between online and offline commerce.”
His upcoming book, The Evolution of the Swipe, will tackle these new frontiers. It will cover things like digital wallets, and the nuances of international payment cultures. True to his unique approach, he is currently “beta testing” the manuscript with a community of payment experts to ensure accuracy.
Siddiqui’s advice to other professionals sitting on a wealth of niche knowledge is simple. “If you have a topic you are passionate about, you should write it. We all have so much in our heads that others could benefit from. Don’t let it stay in a silo.”
