Acquirer
An acquirer is the bank or financial institution that processes card payments on a merchant’s behalf, settling funds from the card networks into the merchant’s account. High-risk acquirers specialize in MCCs and volume profiles that mainstream acquirers decline, at correspondingly different pricing and reserve terms.
A business running on a single acquirer has exactly one point of failure: when that acquirer terminates over a ratio breach or a policy shift, 100% of card processing stops the same day. A second acquirer on separate rails turns a shutdown into a routing switch, typically restoring full volume within 24-48 hours.
A Payment Service Provider aggregates payment processing for merchants, typically holding the direct acquirer relationship itself and onboarding merchants under its own risk appetite, rather than each merchant applying to an acquirer directly.
Chargeback ratio is the share of transactions disputed by cardholders against total transaction count in a given month.
A rolling reserve is a percentage of each settlement an acquirer withholds for a set period, typically 90-180 days, to cover potential future chargebacks or refunds before releasing it back to the merchant.
MATCH (Mastercard’s Member Alert to Control High-risk Merchants), often called the Terminated Merchant File or TMF, is a shared database acquirers check before onboarding a new merchant.