Card Services

Credit cards are essential to business by providing a reliable payment system to the participating merchants. Guaranteed payments move the payment risk and need to qualify customer risk from the business to a financial institution.

Credit cards have been critical to the development of internet commerce with almost all www transactions paid by credit card.

A wide variety of types of cards, parties, programs, rules and fees are designed to satisfy a host of individual and business customer requirements with the numbers supporting their importance:

• Credit cards are the most profitable sector of the American banking industry, with more than $30 billion in profits per year.
• Credit card activities in the US alone represent more than 135 billion individual transactions purchasing nearly $15 trillion dollars in products and services.
• There are 1.5 billion credit cards (including store and gas credit cards) in circulation in the US held by over 181 million individuals.

The card services industry integrates a variety of parties and technology:

• Acquirer
• Affinity Partner
• Cardholder
• Independent Sales Organization
• Card Association
• Insurance Provider
• Issuer
• Merchant
• Transaction Network

Card processing involves a series of steps involving these parties:

• Authorization
• Transaction Batching
• Clearing
• Clearing
• Merchant Payment
• Chargebacks

The Card Services industry model set consists of Enterprise, Business Area, and Data Warehouse logical data models supporting the integrated data requirements of both parties and transaction processing: