The merchant’s side of a card payment
Who actually pays a shop when you tap or type a card? Not the card network. Visa’s annual report for fiscal 2026, filed on November 5, 2026, walks through what it calls the four-party model, with the consumer, the seller, the card’s issuer and the acquirer.
The seller presents the transaction to its acquirer, “usually a bank or third-party processing firm,” which passes it through VisaNet to the issuer for approval. The issuer then pays the acquirer the purchase amount minus the interchange fee. The acquirer pays the seller the amount minus the merchant discount rate.
Visa says that rate is the acquirer’s to set. Its acquiring clients sign up sellers and decide what to charge them, and Visa sets its own fees to acquirers independently.
What the acquirer decides for you
The acquirer also shapes the line you see on a card statement. The October 2026 edition of Visa’s merchant data manual says the merchant name must be the one the business displays most prominently and customers recognize it by. The acquirer is responsible for assigning the correct location of each merchant outlet, and the same country has to appear in the authorization, the clearing record and any chargeback record.
The category code comes from the acquirer too. The manual’s crypto examples show how much hangs on it. A ramp provider that sells bitcoin by card must use code 6051, because it is not a financial institution. A bank that sells a tokenized short-term bond to a cardholder on its own website, acting as the ramp, uses 6012.
Counted by acquirers
Much of Visa’s own picture of where cards work comes from acquirers. The same filing puts the network at more than 400 million seller locations worldwide, a count built from data that acquiring institutions and other third parties supplied as of June 30, 2026. It includes Visa’s estimate of over 200 million indirect locations reached through digital wallets.
Stablecoins at the acquirer’s end
Settlement between the network and acquirers need not always move in bank money. In a release of September 5, 2023, Visa said it was piloting USDC settlement with acquirers Worldpay and Nuvei, having already moved millions of USDC over the Solana and Ethereum blockchains in live pilots. Visa pays the two from its own Circle account, and they can pass the stablecoins on to merchants such as on-ramp providers.
Visa’s 2026 filing describes a Visa Stablecoin Platform designed to let partners settle with Visa in stablecoins.
Often not a bank at all
The name misleads, because the law does not ask for a bank. Article 2 of the EU’s Interchange Fee Regulation defines an acquirer as any payment service provider that signs a contract with the payee, the merchant, to accept and process its card payments. The payment service providers PSD2 recognizes include payment institutions and e-money institutions as well as banks.
Industry definitions hedge the same way. The PCI Security Standards Council’s glossary calls an acquirer “typically” a financial institution that a card brand defines as an acquirer, and Visa’s filing puts third-party processing firms next to banks.
Before you sign a merchant account agreement, check which legal entity it names as the acquirer, since that is the firm that pays out your card sales.