Credit card processing in the UK & Ireland
Whether you're based anywhere in the UK, Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland we have a solution that can be tailored to best suit your business needs.
Payment processing flow
The infrastructure of online payment processing is a little bit more complicated than you might imagine. For the customer, it’s represented by a small window, or a separate website, where they have to pass through the checkout. But actually, processing involves several financial institutions, or tools, verifying the transaction data on both ends, allowing the customer to complete the purchase in a few seconds.
When a customer checks out – passing the card number, expiration date, and CVV – a payment gateway has to perform several tasks, which take about 3-4 seconds:
Customer
A customer presses a “Purchase” button and fills in the necessary fields to pass the transaction data. The data is encrypted and sent to the merchant’s web server via an SSL connection.
Merchant & payment gateway
After the transaction data is received, a merchant passes it to the payment gateway via another encrypted SSL channel. If any of data is stored by a payment gateway, it is settled in a specific type of secured storage. Usually, gateways don’t store actual credit card numbers, but rather save tokens.
Payment processor
The information goes to payment processors. These are the companies that provide payment processing services as third-party players. Payment processors are connected both with a merchant’s account and a payment gateway, transferring data back and forth. At that stage, a payment processor is passing the transaction to a card network (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, etc.).
Visa/Mastercard/American Express/Discover
The role of a card network is to verify the transaction data and pass it to the issuer bank (the bank that produced the cardholder’s credit/debit card).
Issuer bank
The issuer bank also accepts or denies the authorization request. In response, a bank sends a code back to the payment processor, which contains the transaction status or error details.
Payment gateway
Transaction status is returned to the payment gateway, then passed to the website.
Customer & issuing bank
A customer receives a message with the transaction status (accepted or denied) via a payment system interface.
Issuer bank
Within a couple of days (generally the next day), the funds are transferred to the merchant’s account. The transaction is performed by the issuing bank to the acquiring bank.
