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| How Card Transactions Work |
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You are holidaying in Sydney, Australia and have just finished dinner at a restaurant by the Harbour. The bill comes and you give the waiter your Visa card. So what happens next?
When the restaurant in Sydney swipes your Visa card, the 16-digit account number stored in the card’s magnetic stripe flies across the phone line to the merchant’s bank, zips under the ocean to Visa’s data center in Japan and then travels onward to the data center of your issuing bank in Kuala Lumpur. Your bank authorizes the transaction and sends the electronic bits jetting back.
A roundtrip journey that involves multiple stops plus a calculation of how much to charge the merchant in fees and how to split up the fees among the banks.
Time taken: two seconds.
Welcome to the world’s largest and most sophisticated consumer payments processing system.
See how your typical card transaction works with this interactive demo. |
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