Workflow and Regulations of the Online Payments

How does online payment work?

Stripe’s Payment is a payment handling platform. It permits you to charge money from a client or customer’s bank account into your business account using a credit or debit card transaction. But before we go into how payments can be integrated, it would be very helpful to understand how online transactions take place and the different steps involved in it.

Every online transaction has four main actors.

1. Cardholder is the actor or person who holds the credit or debit card.

2. Merchant is the actor who owns the business.

3. Acquirer is a bank that handles card payments on behalf of the merchant and redirects them via the card networks (Visa, MasterCard, RuPay, etc.) to the issuing bank. To facilitate payment processing, acquirers also partner with third-party solutions.

4. Issuing bank is the bank that distributes cards and provides credits to consumers on behalf of the card networks.

The very first step is to create a business bank account and partner with an acquirer or payment processor. The acquirer and payment processor help the merchant transfer payments from their online store or app to card networks. Depending on the arrangement, merchants may have separate entities for acquirer and processor or a single entity that handles both services.

To accept payments securely, merchants also require a payment gateway, which secures sensitive information. Payment gateways commonly use a technique known as tokenization to decouple the payment information (card details) from the app and keep sensitive data out of merchant’s services to help them meet security guidelines called PCI Standards.

When a payment is initiated, the payment gateway encrypts the card details and securely transfers them to the acquirer and then to the card networks. After that, the card network delegates the information to the issuing bank. The issuing bank either accepts or rejects the payment depending on the regulatory rules and additional card verification. The status of the payment is then relayed back to the gateway or acquirer so that merchants can confirm the payment with the customer by displaying a success or error message on their screen.