Acquirer (acquiring bank)
The merchant-side institution that accepts card transactions, routes them to the card networks, and receives settlement for the seller.
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What it is
On the merchant side of every card payment sits an acquirer. It signs up the merchant, receives its transactions, sends them through the card network toward the issuer, and receives settlement on the merchant side of the system.
The acquiring relationship matters when you need a merchant account, negotiate card acceptance pricing, expand into a new country, or route transactions across several acquirers for resilience and approval rates. A payment service provider may manage this relationship for you.
Gotcha: an acquirer is not the customer's bank and is not merely the API that processed the charge. It underwrites the merchant's payment risk, so it can impose reserves, hold payouts, or stop processing when dispute or fraud exposure rises.
Ask AI for it
Design a multi-acquirer card routing layer with Stripe PaymentIntents and the Adyen Payments API as concrete routes, while keeping the acquiring bank separate from the gateway and processor in the domain model. Store each merchant account and supported country, currency, card network, and capability, route transactions by eligibility and health, preserve the chosen acquirer on every attempt, and reconcile Stripe and Adyen settlement and dispute records back to the original payment.