Merchant: Any entity intending to collect payments/ funds in exchange of services or goods. Ex: Grocery stores (Reliance Fresh), E-commerce companies (Amazon, Flipkart), Educational companies (Vedantu, Unacademy)
Banks: A bank is a financial institution where customers can save or borrow money. They take in funds (deposits) from those with money, pool them, and lend them to those who need it. Ex: Union Bank of India, SBI
Transactions: The process/event of moving money from one party to another.
Standing at either end of the transaction are two critical players – the acquiring bank and the issuing bank.
- Acquiring and issuing refer not to specific banks, but to where those banks are in the transaction flow.
- Any bank can do both roles.
- Acquiring bank is the bank on the merchant end of the transaction, and the issuing bank is the cardholder or consumer’s bank.
Wallets: Digital wallets are financial accounts that allow users to store funds, make transactions, and track payment digitally. Ex: Paytm, PhonePe
- These are called PPI or prepaid instruments
- Money can be loaded from all platforms - credit/debit, net banking
Payment aggregators: Single point of settlements for merchants. These entities integrate with the acquiring bank, wallets, net banking and provide it to the merchants as a payment solution without them having to setup a merchant account with a bank. Ex: Razorpay, PayU, Billdesk