PARTIES INVOLVED

• Cardholder: The owner of the card used to create a purchase; the customer.
• Card-issuing bank: The financial organization or other organization that issued the credit card to the cardholder. This bank bills the consumer for refund and bears the threat that the card is used dishonestly. American Express and Discover were before the only card-issuing banks for their individual brands, but as of 2007, this is no longer the case.

• Merchant: The individual or business accepting credit card payments for products or services sold to the cardholder
• Acquiring bank: The financial institution accepting payment for the products or services onside of the merchant.

• self-governing sales association: Resellers (to merchants) of the services of the acquiring bank.
• Merchant account: This could pass on to the acquiring bank or the self-governing sales organization, but in common is the association that the merchant deals with.
• Credit Card association: An relationship of card-issuing banks for example Discover, American Express, Visa, MasterCard, etc. that put transaction conditions for merchants, card-issuing banks, and acquiring banks.
• Transaction network: The system that equipment the mechanics of the electronic transactions. perhaps operated by an self-governing company, and one company might operate many networks. Transaction processing networks consist of: Nabanco, Omaha, NDC Atlanta, Nova, Cardnet, Paymentech, TSYS, Concord EFSnet, and VisaNet.
• Affinity partner: Some organization provide their names to an issuer to attract customers that have a tough relationship with that organization, and get paid a fee or a percentage of the balance for each card issued using their name. Examples of distinctive affinity partners are universities, charities, sports teams, professional organizations, and major retailers.