Card Payment Lifecycle Record

Card Payment Lifecycle Record

Common four-party model

The Federal Reserve describes a common four-party card system with cardholder, merchant, issuer, and merchant acquirer. The payment-card network carries authorization, clearing, and settlement information between the acquiring and issuing sides. Processors and gateways may act for one or more parties.

This is a useful generic model, not a universal transaction map. Credit, debit, prepaid, wallet, domestic, cross-border, commercial, and three-party arrangements can differ.

Lifecycle

Authorization is a real-time decision on a payment attempt. Approval can reflect account status, available credit or funds, credential checks, fraud controls, merchant data, and network rules. It is not final settlement.

Capture records the merchant's decision to submit an authorized transaction. Clearing exchanges detailed transaction records and calculates obligations and fees. Settlement transfers net positions between financial institutions. Merchant payout occurs under the merchant's processor or acquirer terms and can follow a separate schedule.

Reconciliation matches orders, captures, fees, balance transactions, deposits, refunds, and exceptions.

Exceptions

An authorization may expire, reverse, be captured for a different amount where allowed, or never be captured. A settled transaction can still produce a merchant refund, fraud claim, billing-error dispute, chargeback, representment, reserve adjustment, or account debit.

Consumer protections differ by product and jurisdiction. CFPB Regulation Z supplies specific U.S. credit-card billing-error procedures. It should not be generalized to every card or every country.

Evidence boundary

Speed, fees, liability, dispute rights, and payout timing depend on the actual card product, merchant agreement, network rules, acquirer, processor, country, and transaction.