Processors, gateways, and PSPs
Between you and your acquirer sits a stack of companies with overlapping names. The words get used interchangeably, including by the companies themselves, and the confusion is not harmless: when a payment breaks, the name tells you who can actually fix it.
The useful question is never "what do they call themselves." It is "do they touch the money, and whose network membership are they using."
The layers
| Term | What it does | Holds the money? | Network member? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gateway | Moves the message from your checkout to the processor | No | No |
| Processor | Runs the authorization and clearing messages on the acquirer's behalf | No | No |
| Payment service provider (PSP) | Aggregates many merchants under its own acquiring relationship | Usually yes, briefly | No, uses an acquirer's |
| Payment facilitator (PayFac) | A PSP that onboards sub-merchants under its own master account | Yes | No, uses an acquirer's |
| Acquirer | Licensed bank that sponsors the merchant into the network | Yes | Yes |
Read the last column first. Only the acquirer is a member of the card network. Everything above it operates under somebody's licence, which is why a PSP can onboard you in an afternoon while a bank takes weeks: the PSP is putting you inside a relationship that already exists.
A modern provider is usually several of these rows at once, selling one product that spans the gateway, the processing and the acquiring relationship. That is why "who is our acquirer" can be a genuinely hard question to answer, and why the answer matters when something goes wrong. Where a specific provider's arrangement differs, it is recorded in that provider's own notes rather than here.
Facilitators and sub-merchants
A payment facilitator takes on the part of the acquirer's job that scales badly. It holds one master merchant account and onboards sub-merchants underneath it, doing the underwriting itself and carrying the losses when a sub-merchant fails.
This is the model behind every platform where sellers start taking payments the same day they sign up. The trade is speed for liability: the facilitator has accepted the risk the acquirer would otherwise price and refuse.
It also decides who the customer's dispute lands on. Whoever is the merchant of record carries the chargeback, and on a facilitator platform that is frequently not the seller who shipped the goods. Funding and disbursement sets out the questions a platform has to answer before it starts paying third parties.
Who to call
Most payments escalations go to the wrong company first, and the delay is the expensive part.
| Symptom | Who owns it |
|---|---|
| Checkout will not submit a payment | Gateway, or your own integration |
| Authorizations declining at an unusual rate | The issuer is deciding; your processor can show you the codes |
| A batch did not close | Processor |
| Settlement reached your provider but no money arrived | PSP, facilitator or acquirer — this is a funding question |
| A reserve appeared, or funding slowed | Acquirer or PSP, and it is a commercial conversation |
| A deadline or dispute right is unclear | The card network wrote the rule; your acquirer can quote it |
The pattern behind the table: message problems belong to whoever moves messages, and money problems belong to whoever holds money. Nobody in this stack can fix a problem in a layer they do not operate.
Terms introduced
- Gateway — a message router between the merchant and the processor. It never holds funds.
- Processor — the party running authorization and clearing messages on an acquirer's behalf.
- Payment service provider (PSP) — an aggregator that places many merchants under one acquiring relationship.
- Payment facilitator (PayFac) — a PSP that onboards sub-merchants under its own master merchant account.
- Sub-merchant — a merchant operating under a facilitator's master account rather than its own.
- Master merchant account — the facilitator's own account, through which its sub-merchants transact.