Card payments transaction type

Summary

Card payment is a monetary transaction type designed to model a payment using a credit, debit or pre-paid card, or an ATM withdrawal.

It includes the concepts of issuer, cardholder, merchant, submerchant, acquirer, alongside a range of other fields required to model transactions of this type.

From the overall transaction model, it inherits: value + currency; base value + currency; custom fields etc.

Guide to usage

Parties

There are five party types:

• Issuer (optional): the financial institutions that provides the payment card. Responsible for authorizing transactions and billing the cardholder.
• Cardholder (optional): the consumer who uses the payment card to make a purchase.
• Merchant (optional): the business that sells goods or services and accepts card payments from the cardholder.
• Submerchant (optional): A smaller business or individual seller that operates under a larger umbrella merchant or payment facilitator (e.g. ) to accept card payments.
• Acquirer (optional): The financial institution that maintains the merchant's bank account. Responsible for settling the card transactions on the merchant's behalf.

Rules:

1. One of the following must be a customer: cardholder, merchant, submerchant
2. Who is the counterparty:
   1. If customer = cardholder, then the submerchant is counterparty if it exists, otherwise merchant is counterparty
   2. If customer = merchant or submerchant, then cardholder is counterparty
   3. No more than one counterparty can have an external identifier. It’s permissible that none of them do.

Direction

A direction is calculated and stored when the transaction is submitted. It can be used in scenario logic.

If Cardholder is the customer:

• “Regular” payment (authorisation, settlement) is outbound
• Reversal, refund or chargeback are inbound

If Submerchant or Merchant is the customer:

• “Regular” payment (authorisation, settlement) is inbound, the funds are being received by the customer
• Reversal, refund or chargeback are outbound

The following are unusual, but possible:

• If Issuer is the customer, we treat the direction the same way as if Cardholder is the customer
• If Acquirer is the customer, we treat the direction the same way as if Merchant is the customer

Fields

To view the fields and full details, visit the API docs for Create and process a transaction and explore transaction object > monetary > card_payment.