Merchant Glossary: Acquiring Bank

An Acquiring Bank provides credit card merchant accounts. The acquiring bank is a bank that has a relationship with Visa and MasterCard and the merchant's personal or business bank. It is sometimes referred to as the clearing bank, where credit card transactions are cleared through. The acquiring bank is responsible to clear transactions between the time they are charged to a cardholder and then deposited into the merchant's bank account. The acquiring bank is the banking entity that actually makes the deposits into a bank account when credit cards are processed.

Other terms explained in the Merchant Glossary: