⏰ Time to face the Pay(Facs)!

🤔 Did you know that in North America alone there are hundreds of different Payment Facilitators?

These Payment Facilitators (often referred to as Payfacs) have evolved and rapidly increased in popularity among merchants who wish to process credit card payments. 💳 

Traditionally, merchants who desired to accept credit card transactions needed to establish an account with a merchant acquirer/payment processor, (which is just a bank or bank sponsored firm). 

🙋🏽‍♂️ Why does it matter if a merchant is processing through a Payfac?

Now that we have established a basic understanding of what a Payfac is, let's have a look at how merchants processing transactions through a Payfac impacts the ability to track transactions.  

🔗 Shared Merchant IDs (or MIDs):

All merchants who process transactions using a Payfac use a MID that is also used to process transactions by many other merchants. 

Using a shared MID affects the ability to track transactions as shared MIDs do not always have unique identifiers which are necessary to differentiate which merchant locations the transactions were made at.

If a MID that is shared across multiple merchants was added to a single location then that location would track every transaction made at all locations sharing that MID. This would cause transactions that don’t belong to the business onboarded to be tracked to it. 😥

In addition, merchant consent is required for the ability to track a merchant’s transactions. As such, tracking transactions on a shared MID that doesn’t just belong to the merchant who has provided consent raises additional concerns surrounding merchant consent.

Fortunately, at Fidel API we have been able to distinguish additional identifiers with the card networks which do allow us to track most Payfac transactions, at least in the clearing or settlement state.  

Below is a breakdown of what which Payfacs we can track in North America on which card networks:

Even with the progress we have made in tracking PayFacs in North America there are still a few Payfacs which are complete blockers as they do not contain unique identifiers to be able to parse out and track transactions specific to one location.

Below is a list of Payfacs in North America we can and cannot currently track at this time.

*Note: while the list may not include every North American Payfac, it contains most major Payfacs we have encountered significant processing volume through.