Merchant acquiring, unified
topropay is the acquiring layer that connects you to dozens of acquiring banks, Visa and Mastercard acquiring, internet acquiring and hundreds of payment methods — all behind a single API. Smart routing sends each transaction to the acquirer most likely to approve, and cascading failover keeps the sale alive when one bank says no.
The short version
Most businesses begin with a single acquiring bank, then meet the limits the hard way: a scheme that is not supported in a new country, a market where approval rates sag, a renewal that fails silently, or a region that needs its own acquirer and its own integration. Each fix adds another contract, another dashboard and another settlement file to reconcile. Over time the cost is not only fees — it is engineering hours and revenue quietly lost to avoidable declines.
topropay collapses that sprawl into one orchestration layer. A single integration reaches dozens of acquiring banks and hundreds of methods, while a smart routing engine decides — for every transaction — which acquirer is most likely to approve at the lowest cost. You keep the providers and pricing you already have, add new markets as configuration rather than code, and see every settlement in one normalised ledger. The result is more payments cleared and a far simpler payment acquiring operation to run.
Why teams choose us
Merchants move to a unified acquiring layer to win back lost sales and retire stack complexity. Here is what that looks like once every acquirer runs through one connection.
Every transaction is scored and routed to the acquirer most likely to approve it. Fewer false declines means more revenue settling to your account instead of leaking at the authorisation step. On large volumes, a small lift in approval rate compounds into a material gain.
Connect to dozens of acquiring banks through a single relationship. Add a new bank or scheme as configuration rather than a fresh engineering project.
One integration replaces a backlog of separate bank builds. Switch on new acquirers and methods from a dashboard, not a code release.
If an acquirer slows or a bank declines, the engine cascades to the next route inside the same request. Your checkout sees one clean result and the sale survives.
Move volume by cost, currency, scheme or approval rate from a policy you edit yourself — no vendor ticket, no redeploy, and no lock-in on the acquiring contracts you already hold.
Settlements, fees, refunds and chargebacks from each acquirer reconcile into a single normalised export that flows straight to your finance stack.
How it works
From a shopper's tap to settled funds, acquiring processing runs in four stages. topropay handles each one behind the same API, so your team integrates once and the routing, cascading and reconciliation happen automatically.
See how orchestration fits inThe shopper pays at your checkout. topropay receives one request through the unified API, scores it, and selects the acquiring bank most likely to approve for that card, scheme, currency and market.
The chosen acquirer authorises. If it returns a soft decline, the engine cascades to the next ranked acquirer in the same request — transparent to the buyer, who sees only the final approval.
Approved authorisations are captured and sent through the scheme rails for clearing. 3-D Secure 2 and Strong Customer Authentication are applied per transaction where the market requires them.
Each acquirer settles funds on its own cycle. Every settlement, fee and adjustment is normalised into one ledger so reconciliation is a single export, not a file-per-bank merge.
Where it fits
The same acquiring layer serves a checkout selling one product and a platform paying out thousands of sellers. A few of the most common patterns:
Sell into new countries without onboarding a new acquiring bank each time. Local acquiring lifts approval rates and lowers interchange where domestic processing is cheaper than cross-border.
Recover failed renewals automatically. Cascading retries and account-updater logic keep recurring revenue flowing instead of churning on a single bank's soft decline.
Route split payments and payouts across many sellers through one acquiring connection, with reconciliation that keeps every party's ledger straight.
Payment service providers resell multi-acquirer capacity to their own merchants from one integration, white-labelling the routing and reporting underneath.
These patterns overlap more often than not. A subscription business expanding abroad needs renewal recovery and local acquiring at the same time; a marketplace running events needs split payouts and peak-time resilience together. Because every capability sits on one integration, you combine them without adding vendors — and you can change the mix as the business changes, rather than committing to a setup you will outgrow in a year. If your starting point is accepting cards at the checkout, the companion guide on online payments covers the shopper-facing side of the same flow.
Schemes & banks
The platform reaches Visa and Mastercard acquiring through its connected acquiring banks, with American Express and local card schemes alongside them. You do not pick a single acquirer and hope it covers every market — cards acquiring is spread across many banks, and the routing engine chooses the best one per transaction.
That matters most across borders. A Visa payment from a German shopper may clear better on a European acquirer than on one elsewhere, while a Mastercard payment in another market routes to a different bank entirely. Because the decision is made per authorisation, you capture the local advantage automatically without managing the routing yourself.
Capabilities
Everything you need to authorise, route, secure and reconcile an acquiring payment lives in one platform — no extra vendors bolted on around the edges.
Read the API documentationOnline & in-app
Whether a sale happens on a hosted storefront, a custom checkout or inside an app, the card-not-present surface is the same — and it is the part most teams underestimate. The platform carries the regulated weight so your systems never touch raw card numbers.
Cards are vaulted and tokenised on capture, so internet acquiring runs without raw card data crossing your infrastructure. Your PCI scope stays small and your audits stay short.
3-D Secure 2 and SCA fire only where the market and risk profile call for them, so cards acquiring stays compliant without adding friction to every checkout.
Soft declines cascade to another acquirer and failed renewals retry intelligently, so the acquiring payments that would have leaked are recovered inside the same flow.
The same model extends to the local methods buyers reach for first in their own market — wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay, account-to-account transfers, and domestic schemes such as iDEAL, Bancontact and Blik. Offering a familiar method removes friction at the most fragile moment of the sale, and because every rail flows through one integration, you never rebuild your checkout to add the next one.
Industry relevance
Wherever revenue depends on a checkout that converts and clears, the same unified acquiring layer applies. Teams across these sectors run their acquiring through topropay.
The platform serves both mainstream and demanding, high-volume merchants, and it serves payment service providers that resell capacity to their own customers. What stays constant across every sector is the shape of the problem: authorise the payment, get it approved, keep it compliant and account for it cleanly. Solve that once, with one integration, and a new product line or a new country becomes a configuration change rather than a project.
Trust & compliance
Handling money online means handling regulation. The platform is built so the heavy compliance lifting sits with us, keeping your own scope small.
Card data is captured and stored in a tokenised vault built to PCI DSS, keeping your own compliance scope small.
3DS2 and SCA are applied per transaction so European card acquiring stays compliant by default.
Data is processed under EU data-protection rules, with residency options for merchants that need them.
Redundant acquiring and automatic failover keep authorisation available through outages and traffic spikes.
By keeping card data inside a tokenised vault and applying authentication per transaction, topropay holds the regulated surface area of acquiring processing so your own systems never see raw card numbers. That keeps your PCI compliance scope small, your audits shorter and your engineers focused on the product rather than on payment-security plumbing — while redundant acquiring, risk and fraud controls and automatic failover keep authorisation available through outages and seasonal peaks. The wider payment processing process behind every authorisation, the credit card payment processor layer that sits on top, and the unified merchant portal all run through the same orchestration as your payment provider relationships.
Common questions
Merchant acquiring is the service that lets a business accept card payments. An acquiring bank (the acquirer) authorises the transaction with the shopper's issuing bank, then clears and settles the funds into your account. topropay sits in front of many acquirers so you reach all of them through one integration rather than contracting and building to each bank separately.
A single acquirer gives you one route to authorisation. topropay is an orchestration layer above many acquiring banks: it scores each transaction and sends it to the route most likely to approve, then cascades to another acquirer on a soft decline. You get the reach of multiple acquirers and the resilience of automatic failover from one connection.
Yes. Visa and Mastercard acquiring run through the connected acquirers behind the platform, alongside American Express where supported and domestic card schemes in individual markets. Cards acquiring, wallets and account-to-account rails all sit behind the same unified API.
You can. topropay is an orchestration layer, not a closed gateway. Point your current acquiring banks at our API and we add smart routing on top — your pricing and contracts stay exactly as they are, with no lock-in.
Internet acquiring is card acquiring for online and card-not-present sales — e-commerce checkouts, in-app purchases, subscriptions and invoicing. The platform handles internet acquiring with 3-D Secure 2, tokenisation and per-transaction routing so online acquiring payments clear at a high rate while staying compliant.
Authorise, route and cascade, capture and clear, then settle and reconcile. A single API request is scored and routed to the best acquiring bank, soft declines cascade to the next acquirer, approved payments clear through the scheme rails, and every settlement reconciles into one ledger. The acquiring processing detail is handled for you; you see one clean result and one consistent report.
Local acquiring, currencies and methods span Europe, the UK, APAC, LATAM and other regions. As you expand, you switch on new markets and acquiring banks from the dashboard rather than integrating a new provider for each one. Local acquiring typically lifts approval rates and reduces cross-border interchange.
It is built for scale. Per-transaction routing, cascading retries and redundant acquiring are designed for merchants and payment service providers processing serious volume across many markets, schemes and acquirers. PSPs can resell merchant acquiring services to their own customers through the same integration.
Every settlement, fee, refund and chargeback is normalised into a single ledger regardless of which acquirer or method handled the acquiring payment. You export one consistent dataset to your ERP or warehouse instead of merging a file per bank, which is usually the slowest part of running multi-acquirer payment acquiring at scale.
No. Routing decisions are made in milliseconds inside the same payment request, so shoppers experience a single fast result. Cascading retries on a soft decline happen behind the scenes — the customer does not see a failed attempt, only the approval.
Book a discovery call. We map your current setup, score where authorisations leak today, and scope a single-API rollout across your markets — Visa, Mastercard, local schemes and account-to-account included. No acquirer renegotiation, no stack rebuild.
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