Can a merchant have several acquirers at the same time?
Yes. Each acquirer underwrites the merchant separately and issues its own merchant IDs. Scheme rules only require that the acquirer be licensed for the merchant’s location, which in the EEA allows cross-border acquiring. A PayFac can hold the acquiring contracts and give its sub-merchants multi-acquiring without extra agreements.
In detail
Yes. Each acquirer underwrites the merchant separately and issues its own merchant IDs. Scheme rules only require that the acquirer be licensed for the merchant’s location, which in the EEA allows cross-border acquiring. A PayFac can hold the acquiring contracts and give its sub-merchants multi-acquiring without extra agreements.
Several contracts, several MIDs
A multi-acquirer setup keeps several acquiring contracts live, each with its own merchant IDs (MIDs), and decides per transaction where to send it. Every acquirer underwrites the merchant itself and issues its own MID, sometimes one per currency or per country. The merchant signs several agreements, or one with a PayFac that holds the acquiring relationships. In the ACI Worldwide and Edgar, Dunn survey, 57% of merchants and 70% of PSPs worked with multiple acquirers.
Where the acquirers can sit
Visa and Mastercard apply an area-of-use principle: an acquirer may acquire merchants located in the territory its license covers, and a merchant’s location is determined by where it operates, not by where its server sits. In the EEA, the Interchange Fee Regulation opened cross-border acquiring: a merchant in Spain can be acquired from the Netherlands, and the acquirer passports its license. The platform then has to map one merchant to many MIDs and keep MCCs consistent across acquirers.
More detail in our #PayDecoding episode on Multi-acquiring.