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Merchant Agreements: Clauses That Protect an Acquirer or PSP from Transaction Laundering
What Visa and Mastercard require in a merchant agreement and which extra clauses close the gap against transaction laundering: no payments for third parties, a register of sites, suspension of payouts, termination and recovery of fines.
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Illegal Gambling Through Other Businesses’ Card Payments: How the Scheme Works and Who Is Liable
Illegal gambling businesses rarely accept payments under their own name. More often players’ card payments pass through someone else’s ordinary-looking business, and that is exactly what card schemes and banks hold acquirers and payment companies to account for. We go through, according to primary sources, how such a scheme works, what Visa and Mastercard require,…
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Payment Facilitators, Aggregators and ISOs: Who Is Responsible for Sub-Merchants
A payment company onboards many small sellers under one agreement with a bank. If one of them breaks the rules, it is not only the seller who answers. We explain in plain words how a PayFac (also known as a payment aggregator), an ISO and a marketplace differ, who is responsible to Visa and Mastercard…
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KYC and KYB for Payment Providers: Building a Risk-Based Customer Due Diligence Programme
Know your customer (KYC) and know your business (KYB) are the checks a payment company runs on its clients before and during the relationship. Banks, card schemes and supervisors judge you by how well you do them. From 10 July 2027 one EU regulation, the Anti-Money Laundering Regulation (AMLR), replaces the different national rules. This…
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Hiring a Software Contractor: Who Owns the Code and What the Contract Must Say
A company commissions development from a freelancer or a studio, pays against acceptance certificates and assumes the code is its own. The law does not always agree. In many countries the rights in a contractor’s software must be assigned in a written contract, or they stay with the author. We go through how this works…
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Publishing an App on the App Store and Google Play: What the Platforms Require from a Developer in 2026
Publishing an app on the App Store and Google Play is more than uploading a build. The platforms check who you are as a developer, how the app collects data, how it makes money and whether it changes after approval. In 2026 Apple updated its review guidelines three times and its developer agreement four times,…