Merchant Services Terms Beginning with A
ABA Routing Number: The ABA Routing Number is the 9-digit number assigned to individual banks to identify them.
ACH (Automated Clearing House):
The ACH is a secure computer network that efficiently connects individuals, businesses and banks together through the Federal Reserve System enabling electronic payments to flow safely from start to finish.
Acquiring Bank: Need a better description…
Address Verification Service (AVS): The Address Verification Service (AVS) validates a credit card transaction when neither the card nor the cardholder is present by verifying the cardholder’s address against the records of the card issuing bank.
American Express – American Express, also referred to as “AmEx” or “Amex,” is a diversified international financial services company headquartered in New York City.
Annual Fee: An annual fee is any fixed charge that banks or other financial institutions charge for the use of merchant accounts, credit cards or other financial instruments.
Application Fee: An application fee is any charge paid by a potential customer who is asking to be granted permission, access, credit or other services from any institution, financial or otherwise. Application fees for merchant accounts are fairly standard.
Arbitration: A conflict resolution process outside of the court system between two entities that agree to be bound by the arbitrator’s decision.
Authorization: The process whereby a transaction is approved by an issuing bank, authorized agent, or Visa/MasterCard on behalf of that issuer, before the transaction is completed by the merchant via telephone or terminal.
Authorization Code: An authorization code is a numerical or alphanumerical code sent directly by a credit card issuer or issuing bank that is uniquely ascribed to a sales transaction as verification that the completed sale has been authorized.
Authorization Fee – A credit card authorization fee (which is actually an authorization request fee) is the amount of money that is charged directly to an individual merchant account each time communication is made between credit card processing software (when the sale transaction is processed online, etc.) or point of sale (POS) terminal (when the sale transaction is processed physically in person) and the authorizing network.
Authorize.Net: Authorize.Net is a payment gateway service provider, which is a system of processes and technologies that allow merchants to electronically submit credit card payment transactions to payment processing networks, such as a Credit Card Interchange and the ACH Network.
Automated Response Unit: An Automated Response Unit – or ARU – allows the manually keyed entry and the subsequent authorization of a credit card transaction over a traditional landline telephone or cell phone service.
Average Ticket Size (AVT): The average Visa/MasterCard dollar amount of each transaction the merchant anticipates processing or actually processes over time.
AVS: See “Address Verification Service.”
