Card schemes – how they work

Make it easier for your customers to buy from you with our EFTPOS terminals linked to global card schemes including VISA and MasterCard.

With card schemes, your customers can make purchases and pay bills, online or in-store, without the need for cash or cheques. Once it’s up and running, you won’t look back.

How they work

1. A customer purchases goods or services from you.
2. We (the acquirer) will seek authorisation for the transaction from the customer’s bank. We do this via our authorisation system (for schemes like MasterCard and VISA), which checks (a) which bank issued the card and (b) whether your customer’s account has sufficient funds.

3. Where an approval is obtained, the customer completes the purchase and a receipt is issued.

4. You then ‘sell’ this transaction to us and are reimbursed the amount of the sales ticket, less our service fee.

5. This amount is deposited into your NAB transaction account as part of your daily settlement.

6. We’ll submit the transaction to the issuing bank (the card issuer) for payment via the relevant scheme’s (MasterCard, VISA, UnionPay) interchange and settlement system.

7. The issuing bank pays us the amount of the transaction less an interchange fee through the scheme’s settlement system.

8. The customer repays the issuing bank for the goods and services (via their monthly credit card statement).