When the bank acts as an Acquirer, it provides its Acquirer Customers, i.e. merchants and it's own retail branches, with a facility to accept plastic cards at their Points of Interaction (POI's), as an instrument to pay for their goods and services or to perform a banking transaction. The bank will have to set up its own internal merchant structure to include its retail branches and POI's, such as teller desks and ATM's.

When operating in the Acquirer mode, the SmartVista Front-End continuously receives authorisation requests directly from the POI's, executes PIN verification where required, passes the authorisation requests on to Card Schemes, receives Issuer authorisation messages from the Card Schemes, and forwards them to the POI. It also provides facilities for on-line remote control of ATM and POS devices, including fault and status monitoring. All processed transactions are included in the Posting File and sent to the SmartVista Back-Office subsystem.

Based on the authorisations received, the SmartVista Back-Office will generate presentments and pass them to the Card Scheme as part of the Outgoing Clearing File and calculate the Merchant Service Charge (MSC).

Otherwise, the information exchange between the SmartVista components and external systems is similar to the one described for the Issuer side processing, except that now the transaction flow runs in the opposite sense.

For final settlement with the merchant as per their Merchant Agreement, the relevant postings will be generated and sent through the Outgoing Banking System Interface, depending on the Merchant Contract rules: either upon receipt of funds from the cardholder's Issuer, or within a specified period of time after the authorisation.