Glossary
Card scheme
A card scheme is the network and the rulebook behind a card brand: Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover and Diners, JCB and UnionPay internationally, and the domestic schemes such as Elo in Brazil, RuPay in India, Cartes Bancaires in France, Bancontact in Belgium or Girocard in Germany. The scheme connects issuers and acquirers, sets interchange and scheme fees, defines the authorisation and clearing messages, the dispute rules and the monitoring programmes, and licenses banks to issue and acquire its cards.
Four parties and three
Visa and Mastercard are four-party schemes: issuer, acquirer, merchant and cardholder, with the scheme in the middle. American Express and Discover are three-party in most markets: the scheme is the issuer and the acquirer at once, contracts with merchants directly and sets one rate. Domestic schemes are usually four-party and cheaper, and often co-badged with an international brand for use abroad.
What the rules decide
Who may acquire, what a merchant agreement must contain, how payment facilitators register, the interchange tables, the authorisation data required, 3-D Secure and tokenisation standards, reattempt limits, chargeback reason codes and timelines, the chargeback and fraud monitoring programmes and their fines. A payment business lives inside these rules through its acquirers.
On the platform
In Tranzify’s catalogue the schemes appear as card methods with their countries, and acquirers as the providers that connect them; routing rules read the scheme from the BIN, and the reports split approvals, fees and chargebacks by scheme.
Updated: 2026-11-08