Payment gateway

Roles that need it

• Payments Partnerships Manager (Acquiring & Gateways)
• Merchant Acquiring Sales Executive
• Product Owner (Banking)

Skills it belongs to

• Merchant acquiring and payment processing
• API design and integration

Related concepts

• Merchant acquiringMerchant acquiring is the service of contracting with merchants to accept card and other electronic payments, processing those transactions and paying the funds to the merchant. The acquirer bears the merchant's credit risk, such as chargebacks after a merchant fails, so it underwrites merchants and may hold reserves. PSD2 lists acquiring as a payment service.
• Payment facilitator (PayFac)A payment facilitator is a firm that card schemes allow to sign up and serve many small merchants as sub-merchants under its own master merchant account with an acquirer. It onboards merchants quickly and pays them out, while it and the acquirer stay responsible for sub-merchant risk and compliance with scheme rules.
• Network tokenisationNetwork tokenisation replaces a card number with a token issued by the card scheme and tied to a specific merchant or device, so the real card number is neither stored nor transmitted. Tokens update automatically when a card is renewed, which lowers fraud, reduces the scope of PCI DSS and raises approval rates for stored-card payments.
• 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

• PCI Security Standards Council (external site) accessed 31 Oct 2026
• EMV 3-D Secure, EMVCo (external site) accessed 31 Oct 2026

Updated 31 Oct 2026.