Terminology

Acquiring bank
The financial institution that maintains the merchant’s bank account. The acquiring bank is a registered member of the card associations/networks. A contract with the acquiring bank enables merchants to process credit and debit card transactions.

Card network
The card networks play several roles in the processing of payments. They are:

Govern a large community of members (financial institutions) and set fees and regulations
Facilitate the electronic transfer of funds and information
Act as the intermediary between the issuing and acquiring banks
Authorize or deny transactions

Cash balance requirement (reserve)
Every merchant is required to keep a minimum cash balance in their account at CRB. This is generally a multiplier of the merchant's DL and is determined by CRB.

Compliance
Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards ensure that sensitive credit card information is protected from fraudulent use. P2C processing complies with PCI standards.

When a merchant initiates a transaction, they send P2C the token that represents their payee's debit card number. P2C detokenizes the card to retrieve the card number in order for payment to be made. After payment is complete, the card number is sent to tokenization again.

P2C logs contain only masked credit card numbers.

Issuing bank
The financial institution that offers payment cards to consumers on behalf of the card networks. The issuing bank acts as the middle-man for the consumer and the card network by contracting with the cardholders for the terms of the repayment of transactions. They can also reject or approve transactions.

MCC
A 4-digit number that credit card networks assign to businesses that apply to accept card payments. The number denotes the type of business or service it is in.
Card networks use the merchant category codes to categorize, track or restrict certain types of purchases. The codes follow the standards of ISO-18245.

Merchant
In P2C, a merchant is an entity that initiates payment to a recipient by pushing the payment to their debit card, or requests a payment from a recipient by pulling the payment to their debit card.

Merchant services
Category of financial services used by businesses. In the context of P2C, it refers to processing services that enable a business or individual to accept a transaction through a debit card.

Payment gateway
The intermediary system between the payer and payment processor. PTPE [this is where calling this p2c fails] functions as a payment gateway and can perform additional services such as card validation, limit checks, and smart routing, among other services.

Payment processor
The system that authorizes and executes the transfer of funds between the payer and the payee by transferring the money from the payer's account to a payee's account.

Payment rail
Method of sending the funds such as ACH, wire transfer, and P2C.

Prepaid card
A payment card that isn't tied to a bank account.

Redundancy
P2C is designed with N+1 redundancy and ensures system availability. It routes your request over the most cost efficient, available rail.

Reversals
Funds from a transaction that are returned to the cardholder bank account. All P2C transactions are final once completed. Reversals are not supported, even in the event of fraudulent chargebacks.

Submerchant
A merchant that allows other merchants to use their relationship with CRB to issue pushes and pulls via an interface to access the system. This is known as a sub merchant. The merchant is responsible for KYC.

Transaction limit
Maximum Daily Limit (MDL) and Daily Limit (DL)

Every merchant has a predetermined MDL that is set by the CRB sales and credit teams. A merchant can also set a DL below the MDL at any time. An internal software automatically controls the fund transaction limits for each account.

The MDL is the highest amount of aggregate transactions that a merchant can push in one day as determined by CRB.

The DL is the highest amount of aggregate transactions that a merchant can push in one day either at or below the MDL.

Velocity limit
The largest number of transactions that can be initiated in one day. A limit placed on transfers to a single card in a given time period.