Four-party system

A four-party system describes a payment system (usually a card payment system) with the following four parties:

1. the payer (often referred to as the cardholder),
2. the payee (often referred to as the merchant),
3. the payer’s payment service provider (often referred to as the issuer) and
4. the payee’s payment service provider (often referred to as the acquirer).

In addition to these four parties there is often also a system operator. The most commonly known four-party systems are the payment systems offered by MasterCard and Visa.