Local Acquiring vs Cross-Border Acquiring: The Operator Reference

An operator in Jakarta asks whether they need local acquiring in Indonesia. An operator in Riyadh asks the same question about Saudi Arabia. An operator in Seoul asks it about Korea. Each treats it as a market-specific question with a market-specific answer. It isn't. Underneath the market name, it's the same four-part framework every time: can you reach the cards you need without it, does it change how issuers treat your authorizations, does it change your unit economics, and does the regulator require it. This reference is that framework, built once so you don't have to reconstruct it per market.

Scope note up front: this is not a market-by-market rundown — the Indonesia and Egypt operator guides do that. This is the decision layer that sits above any single market: what local acquiring means precisely, why operators actually need it, how to get it, what changes once you have it, and the questions to put to a provider before you sign.

What "Local Acquiring" Actually Means

Local acquiring means the transaction is acquired by an entity licensed or registered in the customer's market, settles in that market's local currency, and is presented to the card-issuing bank as a domestic transaction rather than a cross-border one. Card schemes determine domestic-versus-cross-border status by comparing the country of the acquirer to the country of the card issuer — same country, domestic; different country, cross-border. The cross-border assessment fees that follow are worded differently again: acquirer pass-through schedules state their trigger by merchant location versus issuer or cardholder location, not by acquirer domicile. The two coincide for most operators and come apart precisely when they matter, so both framings appear of standard interchange and scheme fees.

Cross-border acquiring is the alternative structure: a single acquiring entity in one country accepts card transactions originating from customers in many other countries, routing each one back through that single acquirer regardless of where the cardholder or their issuing bank sits. It's operationally simpler — one contract, one settlement currency, one reconciliation feed — and it's what most operators run by default when they expand into a new market without deliberately changing acquiring structure.

Is Cross-Border Acquiring Legal?

Yes, in the overwhelming majority of markets — no general law bars an acquirer licensed in one country from accepting card transactions on behalf of merchants serving customers in another. What varies market to market is viability, not legality, and the distinction matters because a routing mandate is easy to misread as an outright ban.

A handful of markets carve out exceptions worth naming precisely because they get misread. Saudi Arabia's central bank requires domestic ecommerce transactions to route through the Mada scheme under its own technical rules, reserving cross-border acquiring for purchases from stores genuinely outside the Kingdom — cross-border acquiring itself isn't prohibited, it simply cannot reach Mada-branded cards. Indonesia's National Payment Gateway (GPN) framework requires domestic payment transactions — instruments issued in Indonesia and used within Indonesian territory — to route through domestic switching institutions rather than be processed cross-border. India's Reserve Bank requires the underlying data for any payment system operating in the country to be stored on systems located in India, which constrains how a cross-border operator can structure its India processing even where transaction routing itself isn't restricted. South Korea's Electronic Financial Transactions Act licenses payment gateways and acquirers domestically, and the practical effect — confirmed by both the statute and PSP documentation — is that Korean-issued cards route through a licensed Korean payment gateway rather than a foreign acquirer: a foreign acquirer cannot acquire a domestic Korean card directly, regardless of contract structure.

In markets without a comparable mandate — the United States and Singapore among them — cross-border acquiring is fully legal and commonly used, and local acquiring functions as a performance or economics optimization rather than a legal precondition. The market-by-market section below works through both categories in five specific markets.

Local acquiring is easy to conflate with three adjacent things that are not the same decision:

• Local payment methods. A merchant can support Indonesia's QRIS or Brazil's Pix without holding local card acquiring in either market, because those rails don't route through the international card networks the way card acceptance does. Adding a local payment method is a checkout-integration decision; adding local acquiring is a licensing and settlement decision. They're frequently bundled in a PSP's sales pitch as "we support market X" — worth unbundling before you sign anything, and the PSP decision matrix covers the broader provider-selection axes this sits underneath.
• A local entity. Some markets require a local entity as a precondition for any local acquiring relationship; many don't, because a PSP that already holds the licence can extend it to you without local incorporation. Confirm which situation applies rather than assuming either.
• Merchant of Record. An MoR is a different structural layer entirely — it makes a third party the legal seller and shifts tax, compliance, and often chargeback liability onto them. Local acquiring is about who acquires the card transaction and where it presents; MoR is about who is the seller of record. You can have one without the other. See MoR vs PSP: when to switch for that decision on its own terms, and PSP vs PayFac operations for how acquiring sits relative to the master-merchant and sub-merchant models.

The Acquiring Methods, Enumerated

There are five ways a transaction actually gets acquired, and "acquiring methods" as a search phrase is usually asking for this list directly:

1. Cross-border acquiring — a single acquirer outside the customer's market accepts the transaction; the default structure, and the one most operators run without deciding to.
2. Local entity plus a direct acquiring relationship — incorporate, hold the licence or registration, and contract with a local acquirer or bank directly.
3. A PSP that already holds the local licence — the PSP extends its own local acquiring relationship to you without requiring local incorporation.
4. A local acquirer partnership — a second, narrower acquiring relationship layered alongside your primary PSP, typically for one specific domestic scheme your primary provider doesn't cover.
5. A PayFac or Merchant of Record — the facilitator or MoR carries the local acquiring relationship as part of its own stack; you trade direct control for speed.

The full tradeoffs for routes two through five are in the routes table further down; the market-by-market section immediately below shows which of these five actually get used, in five specific markets.

The Four Reasons Operators Actually Need It

Reach: domestic-only schemes you cannot otherwise touch

Some card schemes exist only inside their home market and are not reachable through cross-border acquiring at all. Mada in Saudi Arabia, Meeza in Egypt, and Elo in Brazil are documented examples: each is a domestic scheme operated under central-bank or national-payments-body direction, and each requires a locally licensed acquirer to accept it. Saudi Arabia's central bank rulebook is explicit that domestic ecommerce transactions must route through Mada under its own technical rules, with cross-border acquiring reserved for purchases from stores outside the Kingdom. Elo similarly requires a specialist Latin American acquirer, because it sits outside the standard international card networks.

If a domestic scheme represents meaningful card volume in a market you're serving, this is the cleanest version of the decision: no local acquiring, no access to that volume, full stop. It doesn't require a volume threshold on your side to justify — it requires the scheme to matter in that market.

Approval rates: how issuers treat domestic vs cross-border requests

Card-issuing banks apply different scrutiny to authorization requests depending on whether the request looks domestic or cross-border. A domestically acquired transaction presents in a format the issuing bank recognizes, from an acquirer it has an established relationship with; a cross-border request from an unfamiliar foreign acquirer is exactly the pattern issuer fraud models are tuned to flag. PSP documentation from Adyen and Checkout.com both describe this mechanism — domestic presentment and local bank familiarity as drivers of stronger approval outcomes on locally acquired traffic — without either publishing a universal uplift percentage, because the effect is issuer-, market-, and portfolio-specific.

That's the honest way to state this reason: qualitatively real, but not a number you should import from a vendor's case study or a competitor's blog post. If approval rate is your primary driver, the only credible measurement is a controlled comparison on your own traffic — route a slice of a given market's volume through local acquiring against a control group still on cross-border, and measure the delta yourself before making the switch permanent.

Economics: what cross-border acquiring costs that local acquiring doesn't

Cross-border transactions carry cost layers that domestic transactions don't, and the published numbers are both more specific and larger than they are usually quoted.

Visa's International Service Assessment is not a range. Acquirer pass-through schedules list two discrete rates: 1.00% where the transaction settles in USD and 1.40% where it does not. The trigger, as the most recent Wells Fargo and Fiserv schedules define it, is the merchant sitting in the US while the card issuer or cardholder sits outside it — worth stating precisely, because it is a merchant-location test rather than an acquirer-domicile test, and the two only coincide when your acquirer is where you are. Older schedules (Vantiv 2023, M&T 2019) use acquirer-versus-issuer wording instead, which is almost certainly where the widely-repeated acquirer-domicile framing comes from. On top of that sits Visa's International Acquirer Fee at 0.45% — though not unconditionally: at least one acquirer schedule lists a separate MultiCurrency Cross Border IAF variant at 1.35%, which does not appear in others. Check your own acquirer's schedule rather than assuming 0.45% is the only IAF line that can apply to you.

A caution on the IAF high-risk rate, because it is widely repeated: several acquirer schedules dated 2020–2023 list 0.90% for exactly three direct-marketing MCCs — 5962, 5966 and 5967 — and not for high-risk merchants generally. The most recent schedule PaymentBrief found, effective July 2026, lists 0.45% for high-risk MCCs, as do that acquirer's archived revisions back to 2021. We cannot resolve whether the differential was removed or was never universal, so this reference does not state 0.90% as a current figure. One reading reconciles all the evidence and is worth knowing: Wells Fargo carries two IAF rows — a base 0.45% and a "High Risk MCCs" 0.45% — with no mutual-exclusion language, in a document that elsewhere states explicitly when one fee displaces another. If those rows are additive rather than alternative, a merchant in one of the three MCCs pays 0.90% in total, and the industry figure is decomposed rather than abolished. If your MCC is one of those three, confirm the rate with your own acquirer rather than trusting any published summary, this one included.

Mastercard's US cross-border assessment is 0.60% when the transaction settles in US dollars and 1.00% when it settles in another currency — and, critically, that is not the whole charge. A separate Global Acquirer Fee of 0.85% applies to US-merchant transactions with a non-US issuer or cardholder, stacking on top. The realistic US cross-border assessment load on Mastercard is therefore around 1.45% or 1.85%, and any comparison that quotes only the 0.60%/1.00% line understates it by 85 basis points — roughly 46% of the true load on the non-USD branch and 59% on the USD branch. Mastercard's own published Canada schedule states the same 60/100 basis-point structure and describes it as assessed to acquirers — the closest thing to first-party confirmation available, though it confirms only the cross-border assessment and carries no Global Acquirer Fee line. Note also that Canada's split keys off transaction currency while the US split keys off settlement currency, so the structures are parallel rather than identical.

These are scheme-level assessments layered on top of standard interchange, and they apply because the merchant and issuer sit in different countries — a domestically acquired transaction in the same corridor doesn't trigger them.

Separately, cross-border acquiring usually means the PSP is converting the transaction currency into your settlement currency at the point of acceptance, which reintroduces FX markup as a cost layer — covered in full in FX markup on cross-currency acceptance. Local acquiring that settles you in local currency doesn't eliminate FX exposure, but it moves the conversion decision to you rather than embedding it in every transaction — the full map of where conversion can happen across the chain, and which party bears it at each point, is in FX and cross-border settlement architecture.

Regulatory and data requirements

Some regulators mandate domestic processing or in-country data storage directly, independent of any scheme-reach or economics argument. India's Reserve Bank requires payment system operators to store the complete end-to-end data of any payment system they operate on systems located within India, with the original 2018 directive giving providers a six-month compliance window — a data-residency mandate that sits alongside, not inside, India's separate Payment Aggregator authorisation regime; this piece stops short of that licensing detail, which is covered in full in payment aggregator licensing in India. Indonesia's central bank requires domestic payment transactions — using instruments issued in Indonesia and transacted within its territory — to route through the National Payment Gateway's domestic switching institutions rather than be processed cross-border. In markets with rules like these, local acquiring (or at minimum local processing/data residency) isn't a performance optimization — it's a licensing precondition for operating at all, and it needs to be identified during market-entry due diligence, not discovered after launch.

Local Acquiring by Market: Five Concrete Cases

The four-question framework above is deliberately market-agnostic. Applied to five markets — Indonesia, Brazil, the United States, South Korea, and Singapore — it resolves into three distinct patterns: mandatory for a defined slice of volume, reach-driven for one scheme, and optional-but-beneficial. None of the five require a blanket "local acquiring everywhere" posture; each requires knowing which pattern actually applies before assuming the others' answer transfers over.

Indonesia

Local acquiring in Indonesia is not a single yes/no question — it depends on the instrument. Bank Indonesia's GPN framework requires domestic payment transactions — instruments issued in Indonesia and used within Indonesian territory — to route through domestic switching institutions rather than cross-border, which makes local processing a regulatory precondition for that slice of volume regardless of an operator's size. Foreign-issued Visa and Mastercard transactions are not subject to the same routing mandate and can continue cross-border.

Entity and licensing: a non-bank PJP (payment service provider) needs at least 15% of shares and 51% of voting-carrying shares held domestically, plus domestic board-majority and veto rights — direct majority-foreign ownership of a licensed Indonesian PSP is not the standard path. Most foreign operators instead route through an already-licensed local PSP — Midtrans, Xendit, and DOKU are the realistic options — rather than pursuing direct licensing. Card acquiring runs through BCA, Mandiri, BNI, or BRI as the dominant domestic acquiring banks. Settlement is in Indonesian rupiah. Debit MDR is not negotiated — Bank Indonesia sets it. Under PADG 19/10/PADG/2017 the regular debit rate is 0.15% on-us and 1% off-us, with a ceiling of an additional 0.15% where a non-GPN switch is used, and reduced or zero rates for education, fuel, government and donation categories. QRIS is likewise BI-set. Under the schedule effective 15 March 2025 it is 0.7% for small, medium and large merchants, 0.6% for education, 0.4% for fuel retailers, 0.3% for micro-merchants above IDR 500,000 and 0% below it, and 0% for government and social-donation categories; from 1 October 2026 Bank Indonesia extends the 0% rate to every merchant category on transactions up to IDR 100,000. Any Indonesian debit or QRIS figure you have been quoted that differs from the schedule in force on the transaction date is either stale or not the regulated rate. Credit-card MDR is a different matter: BI's pricing annex covers debit and electronic money only, and no regulator-published Indonesian credit-card MDR figure exists — treat any credit band you see, including ones previously carried on this page, as vendor estimate rather than fact.

Brazil

Brazil's local-acquiring case is scheme-reach, not routing mandate. Elo — the Banco do Brasil/CAIXA/Bradesco domestic card network — sits outside the international card networks entirely; accepting it requires a specialist Latin American acquirer, not a cross-border Visa/Mastercard relationship. If Elo represents meaningful share of a merchant's Brazilian card volume, that's the argument for local acquiring on its own, independent of overall scale.

Entity and licensing: BCB Resolution 80/2021 (25 March 2021, not revoked) establishes Payment Institution licensing categories including Acquirer (credenciador) at Art. 3(III). Two 2025 amendments matter: Resolution BCB 494/2025 revoked the transaction-volume thresholds that previously allowed operation before authorisation (arts. 9 I–II, 10–13), and Joint Resolution BCB/CMN 14/2025 revoked the minimum-capital articles (arts. 17, 20, 21) — so any citation of a minimum-capital figure to Resolution 80 is now pointing at a repealed provision. No published authorisation timeline exists. Resolution 81/2021 delegates timings downstream and Normative Instruction 103/2021 sets applicant-side deadlines only, with none binding BCB; BCB publishes no average authorisation duration. Commonly quoted multi-year estimates are practitioner observation, not a regulatory figure, and are less reliable than usual right now because the 2025 amendments created a filing window that has front-loaded a queue of incumbent applications. Most foreign operators therefore enter through an already-licensed Brazilian acquirer — Cielo, Stone, EBANX, dLocal, or Adyen Brasil (Adyen has confirmed it holds its own Brazil local-acquiring licence directly) — rather than pursuing direct BCB licensing. Settlement is in Brazilian reals; BRL is only partially convertible and capital controls constrain how quickly profits repatriate, a treasury planning item independent of the acquiring decision itself. Brazil is the one market on this page where the regulator publishes the answer. BCB publishes a quarterly value-weighted market-average MDR from acquirer returns: in 2023 Q4 it stood at 2.33% credit, 1.10% debit and 1.55% prepaid. The credit average has been below 2.5% in every quarter since 2018 Q2, and the highest value in the published 2011–2023 series is 2.84% — so any Brazilian credit-card band running to 3% or 4%, including the one this page previously carried, sits above anything BCB has ever recorded. Debit has hovered near 1.1% since 2021. Note these are market averages, not a cap: BCB states that MDR "é um preço determinado entre as partes", a price set between the parties. Quarters from 2024 onward were not obtainable — BCB discontinued the spreadsheet series in July 2025 and the replacement Open Data MDR endpoint currently returns server errors.

United States

The United States is the clearest optional-but-beneficial case among the five: no domestic-only card scheme comparable to Mada or Elo, and no routing mandate comparable to Indonesia's GPN. Visa's ISA and IAF, Mastercard's cross-border assessment, and Mastercard's Global Acquirer Fee — all covered above — apply based on where the merchant and the issuer or cardholder sit, regardless of any US-specific rule, so a US-domiciled acquiring relationship avoids those specific fees on US-card volume the same way a domestic relationship would in any other corridor. Adyen has confirmed it holds a local acquiring licence covering North America directly, alongside Stripe's and Checkout.com's own published US coverage.

What US local acquiring does not solve is money transmission licensing — a separate, state-by-state requirement unrelated to card-acquiring structure. For most operators below enterprise single-market card volume, the PSP-that-already-holds-the-licence route is the practical path; a direct acquiring relationship is a scale decision, not a market-access precondition, because nothing forces it the way a domestic-only scheme or routing mandate would elsewhere.

South Korea

South Korea is the strictest of the five: local acquiring for domestic-card volume is not optional. Under the Electronic Financial Transactions Act, Korean-issued cards route through a licensed Korean payment gateway — Toss Payments, KG Inicis, NHN KCP, or NICE Payments are the realistic options — and a foreign acquirer cannot acquire a domestic Korean card directly. This is a licensing exclusion, not a legality question: cross-border acquiring itself is legal in Korea, it simply cannot reach Korean-issued cards.

Two paths exist for foreign operators without pursuing full domestic licensing. An aggregator — Stripe is the documented example — holds the local PG relationship on the operator's behalf and requires no local entity. A direct contract with a Korean PG requires a Business Registration Number, which means local incorporation. Foreign-issued Visa/Mastercard and PayPal transactions route separately through a cross-border PG, which is often a distinct integration from the domestic-card path. Settlement presents in Korean won; card fees carry a regulated preferential tier for small domestic merchants plus a separate PG/intermediary fee layer that applies to most foreign operators regardless of the regulated tier.

Singapore

Singapore sits at the optional-but-beneficial end, similar to the US: no domestic-only card scheme, no GPN-style routing mandate. Under the Payment Services Act 2019, a foreign PSP needs a Major Payment Institution or Standard Payment Institution licence from MAS to operate domestically, but most operators reach the market through an already-licensed PSP rather than direct licensing — Adyen has confirmed it holds a Singapore local-acquiring licence directly, and Stripe, Checkout.com, and 2C2P all publish Singapore coverage.

Because Singapore has no domestic-only scheme to force the reach argument, the case for local acquiring there rests entirely on the approval-rate and economics reasons described above, tested on an operator's own traffic — not on a regulatory mandate. No authoritative Singapore MDR figure exists, and that is a deliberate regulatory position rather than a gap in the data. MAS told Parliament in 2021 that "as information on MDR is already freely available to merchants, there is no need to mandate disclosure", in 2022 that fees "are commercial decisions" it does not interfere in, and in March 2026 declined a direct request for merchant card-cost figures — offering only that international schemes are "generally higher cost, which can vary from merchant to merchant, while domestic payment schemes like NETS EFTPOS, PayNow and SGQR are significantly lower in costs." Any Singapore MDR band in circulation, including one this page previously carried, traces to PSP marketing rather than a published source. Price your own quotes; do not benchmark against a number nobody publishes. PayNow, the local account-to-account rail, is a separate decision from card acquiring entirely, and MAS's own characterisation places it in the significantly-lower-cost group.

Routes to Get It

Four structural paths get you to local acquiring, and they trade control against speed differently.

The fourth route deserves a caveat: choosing a PayFac or MoR specifically to solve a local-acquiring gap is usually solving the wrong problem with the wrong tool — that's an operating-model decision with its own tradeoffs, not a acquiring-reach shortcut, and should be evaluated on its own merits via the guides linked above.

Ghana is a clean real-world instance of the second row. Most foreign operators there route through an already-licensed PSP rather than pursuing their own Bank of Ghana licence, partly because one of the country's six payment-licence tiers is reserved outright for wholly Ghanaian-owned entities — see Ghana's mobile money and GhIPSS operator guide for the full tier breakdown and capital thresholds.

Turkey sits at the strict end of this same first row for a different reason than Ghana's — not a nationality-reserved licence tier, but an explicit statutory restriction. TCMB's regulation under Law No. 6493 names exactly four categories of entity permitted to perform payment services, card acceptance included, and a foreign PSP with no Turkish entity fits none of them; foreign ownership of the Turkish-incorporated licence holder is workable, cross-border acquiring from outside Turkey is not. See the Turkey payments operator guide for the capital figures and the exact statutory citation behind that answer.

What Changes Operationally Once You Go Local

Adding a local acquiring relationship is not a configuration toggle. Four things change in practice:

Settlement currency and timing. You now receive a local-currency payout on the local acquirer's settlement cycle, rather than having that market's volume folded into your existing settlement batch. Checkout.com's own comparison notes cross-border settlement can run up to five business days versus same-day domestic settlement in some markets — the cadence itself is a variable you need to plan cash flow around, not just the currency.

Reconciliation across an extra settlement source. Every additional acquiring relationship is an additional file format, an additional timing pattern, and an additional set of edge cases to match against orders. This compounds with every market you add local acquiring in — plan for the reconciliation build to scale with the number of acquiring relationships, not the number of markets.

Chargeback and dispute handling under domestic scheme rules. A domestic scheme's dispute rules and timelines are not guaranteed to mirror Visa or Mastercard's. Confirm who handles disputes, what the reason codes and response windows are, and whether your existing chargeback tooling and process cover the new scheme, or whether it needs a manual side-process.

Refunds follow the same acquiring relationship the original sale went through — a card acquired locally is typically refunded locally, which matters if your refund tooling assumes a single acquiring path.

FX exposure moves rather than disappears. Cross-border acquiring bundles FX conversion into the transaction; local acquiring settling you in local currency means you now hold or convert that currency yourself, which is where treasury strategy and FX markup reenter the picture, just at a different point in the flow.

When It's Worth It vs Premature

There's no universal volume number that makes local acquiring worth pursuing — the right test depends on which of the four reasons is actually driving the question, and the questions differ:

• If it's a reach problem (a domestic scheme is otherwise unreachable): does that scheme represent card volume that matters in this specific market, independent of your total company size? If yes, the reach argument stands on its own regardless of overall volume.
• If it's an approval-rate problem: have you measured the delta on your own traffic, or are you extrapolating from a vendor's published case study? Only your own controlled comparison is a valid basis for the decision.
• If it's an economics problem: does the avoided cross-border assessment and FX spread on this market's volume exceed the cost of an additional settlement source, a second reconciliation feed, and the integration or contracting lead time to add it?
• If it's a regulatory problem: is domestic processing or data residency actually mandated in this market, or is it a PSP's marketing framing of a "nice to have"? Confirm against the regulator's own published rule, not a vendor's summary of it.

If none of the four apply with real force in a given market, cross-border acquiring into it is the correct default — adding local acquiring speculatively, ahead of a concrete reach, approval, economics, or regulatory driver, adds settlement and reconciliation complexity without a matched benefit.

Decision Table

No single volume threshold generalizes across markets, but the signals below do. Read each row independently — a market can land on "cross-border is fine" for most signals and still tip to "local acquiring is worth pursuing" on the strength of a single one, such as a domestic-only scheme or a regulatory mandate.

Failure Scenarios

Assuming "we support market X" means local acquiring. The single most common operator mistake: a PSP's coverage page or sales deck lists a market, and the operator assumes that means domestic acquiring with the full reach and approval benefit. It frequently means cross-border acquiring into that market with local payment methods layered on top — a materially different thing. Get the acquirer-of-record answer in writing.

Discovering domestic-scheme cards are unreachable post-launch. If a market's domestic scheme carries meaningful share and your PSP only offers cross-border acquiring there, you find out when authorization data shows a segment of local cards simply never converting — not a clean error, just a gap in what's reachable. This is a pre-launch due-diligence item, not a post-launch fix.

Settlement-currency surprise. Finance teams that expect a single consolidated settlement batch discover a new local-currency payout on a different cycle, with its own FX conversion decision now sitting on their desk instead of embedded in the PSP's rate.

Reconciliation break from a second settlement source. Reconciliation tooling built around a single acquiring feed doesn't automatically extend to a second one with a different file format and timing — this is an integration project, not a configuration change, and underestimating it is a recurring failure mode.

Regulatory mandate discovered late. Data-residency or domestic-processing requirements, where they exist, are typically discovered during a compliance review or a regulator inquiry rather than during initial market-entry planning — because they don't show up in a PSP's standard onboarding conversation unless asked about directly.

Provider Verification Checklist

Before assuming a provider gives you local acquiring in a market, put these questions to them directly and get the answers in writing:

• Is this local acquiring, or cross-border acquiring with local payment methods layered on top? These get bundled in sales conversations; ask for the acquirer-of-record answer specifically.
• Which entity is the acquirer of record for this market? Get the legal entity name and its licensing jurisdiction, not just the PSP's brand name.
• What is the settlement currency and cycle for this market? Confirm whether you're paid in local currency or converted, and on what cadence.
• Which domestic schemes are actually included? A market can have several — confirm coverage scheme by scheme (Mada, Meeza, Elo, or others relevant to the market) rather than assuming "local acquiring" covers all of them.
• Who handles disputes and chargebacks for transactions acquired through this relationship? Confirm the reason codes, timelines, and whether it plugs into your existing chargeback tooling or requires a separate process.
• What does reconciliation look like — a unified feed with your other markets, or a separate file and timing pattern? This determines whether it's a configuration change or an integration project on your side.

Scope Note

Tier 1 — scheme and issuer mechanics: the domestic-vs-cross-border determination (acquirer country vs issuer country for scheme purposes; merchant country vs issuer or cardholder country in the acquirer fee schedules) and the resulting scheme assessment fees are drawn from PSP documentation (Adyen, Checkout.com) summarizing card-scheme rules; the Visa Core Rules and Visa Product and Service Rules (18 April 2026) are in fact public — but they contain no fee schedule at all: a search of the full 923-page document returns zero occurrences of "International Service Assessment", "International Acquirer Fee" or "International Service Fee". What is gated is the separate member fee guide that sets these rates. Fee percentages cited (Visa ISA 1.00%/1.40% + IAF 0.45%; Mastercard cross-border 0.60%/1.00% + Global Acquirer Fee 0.85%) come from acquirer pass-through fee schedules — Wells Fargo Merchant Services effective 1 July 2026, corroborated across Fiserv, Vantiv/Worldpay, Woodforest and M&T schedules — not from Visa's or Mastercard's own US publications. Neither scheme publishes a US acquirer fee schedule. Visa's US support pages publish interchange only; Mastercard publishes network assessment fees for Canada but no US equivalent. Mastercard's Canada schedule (effective 1 July 2025) is the one first-party document confirming the 60/100 basis-point cross-border structure, stated against CAD. A 20 July 2026 increase from 60bp to 100bp on certain non-DCC cross-border Mastercard transactions applies to Canada only (collapsing Canada to a single 100bp rate regardless of currency) and is not a US change — it is frequently misreported as one.

Tier 2 — PSP documentation: Adyen, Stripe, and Checkout.com's own published local-acquiring pages, cited directly for their definitions, coverage claims, and mechanism descriptions; Stripe's own Korea payments documentation is cited directly for the aggregator/local-entity distinction in that market.

Tier 3 — regulator/scheme-operator sources: SAMA's rulebook (Mada), the Reserve Bank of India's notification (data storage), Bank Indonesia's payment system infrastructure and licensing pages (GPN, PJP ownership rules), Banco Central do Brasil's published legislation (Resolution 80/2021 acquirer licensing), South Korea's Electronic Financial Transactions Act (KLRI's English translation), and MAS's Guide to the Payment Services Act 2019 are each cited directly from the regulator's own publication.

Tier 4 — market practice / operator inference: the decision framework, routes-to-get-it tradeoffs, operational-change checklist, decision table, and failure scenarios are this article's synthesis, built from the sourced mechanisms above rather than any single cited document. The card MDR figures in the market-by-market section were rebuilt in the 2026-08-26 refresh and no longer reuse the market pages' previous bands, which carried no source entries behind them. Indonesia debit and QRIS are now cited to Bank Indonesia's own pricing instruments, Brazil to BCB's published quarterly market average, and Singapore records that MAS has declined to publish any figure. The corresponding market pages were corrected in the same change so the two do not disagree. No authorization-uplift percentage is asserted anywhere in this article — the approval-rate mechanism is described qualitatively because the magnitude is issuer-, market-, and portfolio-specific and no general figure is defensible; operators are directed to measure it on their own traffic. South Korea's "foreign acquirer cannot acquire a domestic card directly" claim is a synthesis of the EFTA licensing framework and documented PSP practice (Stripe requiring a local processor or Business Registration Number), consistent with how the same claim is sourced elsewhere on this site.

Related References

• How to Choose a PSP: A Decision Matrix for Payment Operators — owns the broader provider-class selection decision (volume, geography, operating model, vertical) that local acquiring sits underneath as one geographic modifier
• PSP vs PayFac Operations: A Model Reference for Operators — owns the structural comparison of who holds the merchant account and owns risk across PSP, PayFac, acquirer, marketplace, and MoR models
• FX Markup Economics: How Cross-Currency Acceptance Quietly Eats Margin — owns FX markup and DCC mechanics; local acquiring changes where FX exposure sits but does not eliminate it
• MoR vs PSP: When the Premium Beats Doing It Yourself — owns the Merchant of Record decision; local acquiring and MoR are independent layers that are frequently conflated
• Indonesia Payments Operator Guide and Egypt Payments Operator Guide — market-level detail on domestic rails and schemes referenced here as illustrations

For term definitions — acquirer, interchange-plus — see the Payments Glossary.