Merchant Acquiring and Authorization

Merchant acquiring and authorization terms describe how merchants accept card payments, obtain approvals, hold funds, batch transactions, and receive settlement through acquirers and processors. This branch covers acquiring bank, authorization, authorization hold, floor limit, merchant account, and omni-channel banking.

Use these pages when merchant acceptance, authorization evidence, settlement funding, acquirer responsibility, or processor records affect a payment decision.

What This Branch Covers

Decision Lens

Start with the merchant record. Authorization approval, authorization hold, capture, settlement, and merchant funding happen at different stages.

Evaluation Checklist

• Identify the merchant, acquirer, processor, card network, issuer, authorization code, capture date, batch date, settlement date, fee, and dispute status.
• Separate approval, hold, capture, clearing, settlement, merchant-account funding, and chargeback reserves.
• Check terminal or gateway logs, merchant statements, authorization records, settlement batches, processor reports, and acquirer agreements.
• Review whether the term changes merchant cash flow, customer balance, fraud exposure, fee treatment, or reconciliation.
• Treat legal, regulatory, tax, privacy, and liability conclusions as professional-advice areas.

Common Mistakes

• Treating authorization approval as final merchant funding.
• Ignoring processor reserves, settlement delay, and chargeback exposure.
• Reviewing a hold without checking whether the transaction was captured or released.
• Confusing the acquiring bank with the cardholder’s issuing bank.

In this section

Choose a subsection first. Deeper term pages live inside each subsection, which keeps large topic hubs readable.