Issuer: issuer of payment cards. Most banks issue payment cards to their account holders (both debit and credit cards). There are also specialised issuers of mainly credit cards, such as International Card Services (ICS) in the Netherlands.
Acquirer: Institution that receives card payments on behalf of companies and organisations where customers can pay by debit or credit card. The larger banks offer this service but specialists such as Worldline also offer it.
PSP: Payment service provider. Provider of various payment services to merchants. For example, a PSP operates between various acquirers and web shops and handles all or part of the electronic payment traffic for those web shops, for multiple online payment methods.
Card Scheme: the rules and agreements for the payment cards of a certain brand with which issuers and acquirers must comply. The Dutch are most familiar with the schemes of Maestro and V PAY for debit cards and of American Express, Mastercard and VISA for credit cards.
PSD2: Revised Payment Services Directive, the most recent legal directive for payment services in the European Union. One of the provisions in PSD2 is that, in principle, all electronic payments must be approved by customers with SCA.
SCA: strong customer authentication, double verification or two factor authentication. Under PSD2, essentially all electronic payments must be approved by customers with SCA. In practice, this means that the customer must approve a payment using a combination of two secure and independent factors, such as, for example, a personal bank card combined with a secret PIN code. Or, for example, a registered app on a personal smartphone combined with a unique fingerprint.
EMV 3-D Secure of 3DS: An industry technical SCA standard for most online card transactions. EMV used to stand for Europay, Mastercard and VISA, three occidental schemes for card payments. Europay no longer exists and nowadays EMV stands for the industry technical standards for payment cards from all leading card schemes, anywhere in the world. 3DS is the EMV standard for secure online card payments with SCA.
Legacy Transaction: credit card payment the old way, without strong customer authentication (SCA).
Soft Decline: the rejection by an issuer of an online card payment that does not meet the requirements of SCA (legacy transaction). The online store can then offer this payment to the issuer wíth SCA.
Merchant Initiated Transaction (MIT): payment offered by the accepting party (such as an online store) to the issuer without the involvement of the customer (the card holder). This is possible, for example, if the merchant is authorised in advance by the card holder to make the payment at a later time. It is a kind of direct debit for payment cards, especially useful for monthly automatic payment of subscriptions or for making the customer pay after an order has been shipped.
