One integration layer for every way you get paid.
Terminals at the desk, online checkout, pay-by-link, charges raised inside your PMS or POS — payment integration is the layer that connects where you accept money to the gateways, acquirers and methods that approve and move it. Accepting a payment and receiving the money are not the same event. Integration governs the first.
Integration is the connective tissue between where you take payment and the rails that move it.
On one side sit the points of interaction — terminal, checkout, pay-by-link, in-PMS charge. On the other sit the gateways, acquirers, card schemes and alternative methods that decide whether a payment is approved and, later, move the funds. Integration gets a clean approved or declined back in real time and records the transaction, so every later stage — settlement, reconciliation, accounting — has something accurate to work from.
The elements involved.
- Points of interaction
- Card-present terminals, card-not-present (web/app checkout, MOTO, pay-by-link), and in-context flows raised directly inside the PMS or POS.
- The gateway
- Routes the authorisation request and returns the result. The approve/decline decision point.
- Acquirer / PSP
- Holds the merchant relationship and connects to the schemes and banking rails.
- Card schemes and networks
- The card networks, plus account-to-account and local/regional methods.
- Tokenisation and vaulting
- Reusable tokens replace raw card data (recurring, no-show, deposits) and reduce PCI scope.
- Protocols and APIs
- Terminal-to-host protocols for devices; host APIs for online and back-office flows.
- Authentication
- SCA / 3-D Secure for card-not-present, verifying the cardholder before approval.
- Routing and orchestration
- Multiple acquirers, fallback, and directing each transaction to the best or lowest-cost path.
Every terminal protocol, acquirer host and payment method behaves differently and must be certified independently. Each new geography adds local methods and rules. Card data carries PCI DSS obligations. And the PMS and POS must stay in sync with what actually happened on the payment side — a mismatch here propagates into every downstream stage.
Key terms.
- Authorisation
- approval to charge, not the movement of money.
- Capture
- flagging an authorised amount to be settled.
- Gateway
- the routing/decision layer.
- Acquirer / PSP
- the merchant's payment processor.
- Tokenisation
- substituting a reusable token for card data.
- SCA / 3DS
- cardholder authentication for online payments.
See payment integration in practice.
Acceptance is the first link in the chain. Talk to our team about your estate, or see how the integration layer works inside the platform.