Payment Service Provider

A Payment Service Provider (PSP) is a company whose function consists in providing online merchants with the services to be able to process electronic payments. Simply put, it is the merchant’s link to the bank to facilitate both the authorization of generated purchase orders and the payment collection. However, Internet PSPs also work as an alternative for those merchants unable to qualify for an internet merchant account.

The payment methods that PSPs accepts are: direct debit, credit card, bank transfer, and real-time bank transfer.

Having a PSP accepting electronic payments for an online business offers a full range of benefits:

1. Fraud protection: the major risk of accepting card payments online is fraud. Since some PSPs can also issue internet merchant accounts (IMAs) they know out of experience the consequences of chargebacks and how to deal with them. Therefore, they usually offer fraud prevention tools to help reduce them.
2. Taxation: a fixed or variable tax rate is assigned to transactions in all online payment systems.
3. Full guarantee against risks: this feature allows gaining the confidence of consumers who made use of it and it is particularly useful when it comes to international transactions.