Merchant Services Industry Terms Which Everyone Needs to Know

If you deal with electronic payments then you have definitely heard the terms like merchant services provider, payment services provider, merchant, association and many other. In order to understand the essence of the payment processing better, you need to be aware of the terms which describe the specific concepts inside this sphere. Here is the explanation of some terms which are considered to be the most widely used ones.

1. Merchant services can be defined as financial services which allow businesses to accept different types of payments (credit and debit card payments, ACH payments and other types of electronic payments).
2. MSP (merchant services provider) is a company which provides a payment processing services required by a merchant.
3. PSP (payment service provider) is a company that provides credit, debit and bank draft payment services to a merchant.
4. Merchant is any business or individual that accepts payments for goods or services they supply.
5. Association is an organization that licenses bank credit card programs, for instance, Visa, Mastercard etc.

You can also be interested in terms like issuer, acquirer and a payment gateway and you can find them in the article which is published at payvisors.com. What is more some additional information on the above-mentioned terms is provided there.