Glossary
Acquirer
An acquirer, or acquiring bank, is the licensed financial institution that signs a merchant up for card acceptance, sends its transactions to Visa, Mastercard and the other schemes for authorisation, receives the funds from the card issuers and settles them to the merchant, and carries the chargebacks that come back. Every card payment has one acquirer on the merchant's side and one issuer on the cardholder's side.
How an acquirer fits into a payment
The merchant has a contract with the acquirer, directly or through a payment service provider that resells the acquirer’s service. When a card is entered, the request goes to the acquirer, which forwards it through the scheme to the issuer; the issuer approves or declines; the acquirer returns the answer. At the end of the day the scheme moves the money from the issuers to the acquirer, and the acquirer pays the merchant on the agreed schedule, less its fees. A chargeback runs the same way in reverse.
Why a payment business works with several acquirers
Acquirers differ in the countries and currencies they serve, in the merchant categories they accept, in approval rates by card type and in price. A platform that connects several of them lets routing send each payment to the acquirer most likely to approve it at the lowest cost, and lets a cascade retry a decline on the next one.
On the platform
In Tranzify an acquirer is a provider in the catalogue and a terminal in a client’s network: the client’s own contract and account, enabled by routing rules. The platform never acquires anything itself; it routes the payment to the acquirer the client chose and records the answer.
Updated: 2026-11-08