Glossary
Technical service provider
A technical service provider is a company that supports the provision of payment services without at any time entering into possession of the funds: it processes and stores data, protects privacy, authenticates users, supplies IT and communication networks, terminals and devices. PSD2 article 3(j) excludes such providers from the licence requirement; the payment service, the contracts with merchants and the responsibility for the money stay with the licensed institution that uses the technology.
What the exclusion covers
Software platforms, gateways and orchestration run on behalf of licensed institutions, data centres, tokenisation and authentication providers, hardware. The test is possession of funds: the moment a company receives, holds or transfers payers’ money in its own name it is providing a payment service and needs a licence.
What the licensed party keeps
Outsourcing a critical function to a technical provider does not move the obligation: the institution answers to its regulator for the platform’s security, availability and data handling, must keep audit and exit rights in its contract, and must be able to produce records. A technical provider is chosen for how well it lets the institution meet those duties.
On the platform
Tranzify is a technical service provider in this sense: it never holds funds and provides no payment service; its clients hold the licences. The platform is built for their outsourcing duties: deployment in the client’s own cloud account, a five-year journal and ten-year logs, documented controls and a payment trace for every transaction.
Updated: 2026-11-08