An ecommerce payment gateway is a payment system used by all online sales businesses.

There are currently many payment services available, a large percentage of which have been developed by Fintech companies. However, it is important to take into account several elements when choosing a payment gateway provider in order to have optimal operations without problems for customers or losses for merchants.

For a long time the most widely used payment method has been card acquiring – a process whereby, when you make a payment with your card, your cardholder data is transferred to the acquiring financial institution of the merchant that processes the payment, creating a network between this entity and the one that issues your card, in order to approve the payment.

All merchants are different, and in the case of card-acquiring payment gateways they are divided into business types to which a Merchant Category Code (MCC) corresponds, which identifies them when a card payment is processed. This code determines whether a business is low risk, high risk, among other categories.

Some payment service providers do not accept high-risk merchants, such as those in the gambling sector. In other cases, payment gateways accept them with higher commissions, generating higher transaction costs for merchants. On the other hand, many banking entities reject transactions –even blocking the cards and accounts of cardholders– when a business is identified as high-risk, causing loss of customers for that merchant.

On the other hand, when the payment is approved, many gambling business customers, who lose money gambling, lie saying that their card was fraudulently used by someone else on their web pages and request a chargeback. In these situations merchants must spend resources and time to resolve these disputes, and in many of them, due to regulations of large payment processing companies, they are forced to chargeback, again generating losses for the business.

In response to this problem, several companies, especially Fintech companies, have developed alternative payment gateways. This is the case of Blackcatcard, a European neobank that provides a corporate payment solution based on intra-bank transactions. In this type of payment gateway, a merchant can integrate into its business a system that accepts payments from customers with Blackcatcard accounts. For this it is necessary for the merchant to have a business account opened with this neobank as well.

One of the advantages of this payment model is that it fits the needs of most businesses, including those considered high risk, such as gambling and crypto services. There are no problems with rejection, loss of customers and blocking of their accounts, as the neobank has full knowledge of who is the merchant and who is the customer, making the transaction approval much simpler. In addition, since the payment provider knows both sides of the transaction, there is no room for chargebacks, creating more stability for the business and avoiding the common problems related to card acquisition.