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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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Transaction Laundering and Miscoding: The Hidden Threats to Your Fintech Business
Two linked threats can cost a payment company its card scheme access: transaction laundering and miscoding. In the first, an illicit merchant processes payments through a legitimate merchant’s account. In the second, a wrong merchant category code hides what the merchant really does. Visa and Mastercard hold acquirers responsible for their merchants, and acquirers pass…
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Brazil’s Betting Ban: Provisional Measure No. 1,394 and What Comes Next
On 25 September 2026 Brazil’s president signed Provisional Measure No. 1,394 (Medida Provisória), which banned fixed-odds betting in the country, that is sports betting and online casinos, including for operators abroad. The regulated market that opened under Law 14,790/2023 is closed. Licences are extinguished on 25 October, banks and payment institutions may not process such…