Payment Facilitators/Aggregators

A payment facilitator (or aggregator) is a payment service provider that enables merchants to accept customer payments using the payment facilitator’s infrastructure. The benefit of this model is that it simplifies and speeds up the onboarding process for smaller businesses that may not have the transaction volume to justify opening their own dedicated merchant account and for businesses that want to begin accepting payments quickly.

Payment facilitators are responsible for the onboarding process of their customers. These customers are referred to as submerchants. A payment facilitator is also responsible for underwriting and risk assessment, settling funds with submerchants, dealing with chargebacks and disputes, and ensuring compliance with regulations in the payment industry. This allows the businesses under the payment facilitator’s umbrella to focus on their core operations rather than deal with the complexities of the payment process.

Requirements

Payment facilitators are required to send the fields below per transaction.

In addition, Ecentric requires the payment facilitator IDs that are issued by the payment facilitator's acquiring bank for both Visa and MasterCard.

 

FIELD NAME	TYPE	SIZE (MAX)	DESCRIPTION
SubMerchantID Required	string	15	The unique ID for each submerchant. Determined by the payment facilitator (or aggregator)
MerchantCategoryCode Required	string	4	The unique Merchant Category Code for the submerchant (e.g. 5399)
CardAcceptorName Required	string	40	40 characters containing submerchant details: Pos 1-23: CardAcceptorName as per below (max length 23) Pos 24-36: City of submerchant (max length 13) Pos 37-38: Region (first 2 characters of region code see table below) Pos 39-40: Country code (Country = ZA for South Africa) ABSA, FNB and Nedbank requires the following format for CardAcceptorName: PayFacName*(asterix)SubMerchantName where the * (asterix) is required in positions 4, 8 or 13 ONLY. Examples: Pos 4: Pay*Submerchant1 Pos 8: PayFaci*Submerchant2 Pos 13: PayFacilitat*Submerchan (Limited to length 23)   Standard Bank requires the following format for CardAcceptorName: Pos 1-23: SubMerchantName
MerchantAddress Required	Address		A unique address of the submerchant
MerchantPhone Required	string	16	The phone number of the submerchant
MerchantURL Required	string	255	The unique URL of the submerchant