Cards, Wallets, and Point-of-Sale Technology

Cards, wallets, and point-of-sale technology terms describe the hardware, software, credentials, and processing services used to accept, authenticate, route, and reconcile card and wallet payments. This branch covers POS terminals, payment processors, card security, digital wallets, ATMs, and cheque-imaging tools.

Use these pages when a merchant record, customer transaction, card-authentication event, bank-machine record, wallet transaction, or deposit-capture workflow depends on the technology used at the payment edge. The practical issue is usually authorization, fraud exposure, settlement timing, dispute evidence, fees, or reconciliation.

What This Branch Covers

Decision Lens

Start with the transaction environment: card-present, card-not-present, mobile wallet, ATM, cheque image, or stored-value workflow. Then identify who captured the credential, who authorized the transaction, which processor or network routed it, when settlement occurred, and where the record appears.

Evaluation Checklist

• Identify the device, card or wallet credential, merchant, processor, network, issuer, and transaction date.
• Separate authorization, capture, clearing, settlement, posting, and dispute evidence.
• Check authentication method, tokenization, chip or magstripe data, and card-present status.
• Review fees, chargebacks, fraud controls, terminal logs, batch records, and reconciliation reports.
• Treat legal, regulatory, privacy, tax, and consumer-protection conclusions as professional-advice areas.

Common Mistakes

• Treating authorization as final settlement.
• Confusing a payment gateway with a payment processor.
• Assuming a wallet transaction always has the same dispute rights as the underlying card.
• Ignoring terminal, batch, and processor records when reconciling merchant payments.

In this section

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