Acquirer (acquiring bank)

The financial institution that holds your merchant account and is on the hook for accepting card transactions on your behalf.

When this matters

You are negotiating commercial terms or MDR in a direct acquiring setup.
You are deciding whether to use a PSP’s bundled acquiring or bring your own acquirer.
You are troubleshooting scheme or issuer-specific decline patterns.

Operator tips

Ask how the acquirer routes traffic (by BIN, region, or scheme rules) and what levers you control.
Understand settlement currencies and how FX is handled between acquirer and PSP.
Benchmark acquirers on authorization performance, not just headline fees.

How to use this term

Use this definition when you are aligning stakeholders across product, engineering, finance, and operations. Shared vocabulary makes it much easier to argue about tradeoffs without talking past each other.

For deeper context, pair this term with the free assessment and providers/methods directories. They give you a concrete view of how concepts show up in real stacks.