Card authorisation, clearing and settlement

Roles that need it

• Payments Operations Analyst
• Merchant Acquiring Sales Executive
• Payments Partnerships Manager (Acquiring & Gateways)
• Fraud Analyst

Skills it belongs to

• Merchant acquiring and payment processing
• Payments and cards products (schemes, chargebacks, PSD2, open banking)

Related concepts

• Four-party card schemeA four-party card scheme is a payment card scheme in which the cardholder's bank (issuer) and the merchant's bank (acquirer) are different firms, connected through the scheme's network and rules, so each transaction involves cardholder, issuer, acquirer and merchant. In a three-party scheme the scheme itself issues the cards and acquires the merchants.
• Interchange feeAn interchange fee is the fee paid for each card transaction between the acquirer (the merchant's bank) and the issuer (the cardholder's bank), usually set by the card scheme. In the EU, the Interchange Fee Regulation caps it at 0.2% of the transaction value for consumer debit cards and 0.3% for consumer credit cards in four-party schemes.
• ChargebackA chargeback is the reversal of a card transaction started by the cardholder's bank (the issuer) under card scheme rules after the cardholder disputes it, for reasons such as fraud or goods not received. The merchant's bank (the acquirer) debits the merchant, who can contest it through representment and, if needed, scheme arbitration.
• 3-D Secure (3DS)3-D Secure is the protocol card issuers use to authenticate the cardholder in online card payments, maintained by EMVCo as EMV 3-D Secure. The merchant sends transaction and device data, and the issuer approves without friction or challenges the cardholder, for example in a banking app. It is the main way to apply strong customer authentication to cards and moves fraud liability to the issuer.

Sources

• ECB glossary, entries A, European Central Bank (external site) accessed 31 Oct 2026
• Regulation (EU) 2015/751 on interchange fees for card-based payment transactions, EUR-Lex (external site) accessed 31 Oct 2026

Updated 31 Oct 2026.