Glossary
Payment institution
A payment institution is a company authorised by a national regulator to provide payment services: acquiring card payments, executing transfers, money remittance, issuing payment instruments, payment initiation and account information. In the EU the status comes from PSD2 with initial capital from EUR 20,000 to EUR 125,000 depending on the services, safeguarding of customer funds, fit-and-proper management and ongoing reporting; the UK, Switzerland and other markets have equivalent regimes under different names.
What the licence allows
Contracting with merchants to accept payments, holding their funds between receipt and settlement, paying them out, offering accounts for payment purposes and initiating payments from customers’ bank accounts. An EU authorisation passports into every other EEA member state; outside the EEA each market needs its own licence or a licensed partner.
Obligations
Safeguarding customer money in separate accounts or through insurance, capital that follows the volume, anti-money-laundering controls as an obliged entity, complaint handling, incident reporting, outsourcing rules for critical functions such as the payment platform, and audits by the regulator.
On the platform
Tranzify’s clients are payment institutions, electronic money institutions, banks and the resellers that work with them; the platform is the software they operate under their licence, built to be deployed in the client’s own cloud account and to keep the journal and logs the client’s outsourcing and record-keeping duties require.
Updated: 2026-11-08