A Payments Service Provider (PSP) is the organisation that provides the link between your website and the bank. A PSP provides a range of services, the link between the website and the bank is known as a Payments Gateway. In payment terminology the owner of the website is known as the Merchant and the bank that the payments are processed into is known as the Acquiring Bank. An acquiring bank is any high street bank that offers credit and debit card processing services. The PSP processes the transactions by taking the customer's card details over the Internet via their Payment Gateway and passes them to the acquiring bank. The result of the transaction from the acquiring bank is then passed back to the website to be displayed to the customer. If you are familiar with credit card use in an environment where the customer is present such as a shop then you can think of the Payment Gateway as a virtual swipe card machine.

Take a look at our Online Payments Animation which illustrates the various steps involved in the processing of an online credit card transaction. In order to use the services of the PSP you must have a Internet Merchant Account with an acquiring bank.

If you are interested in Irish Payment Service Providers then our comparison table will allow you to compare the services offered by each.

What is a Payment Bureau? <<  Index >> Internet Merchant Accounts