The Journey of a Transaction

In the third part of the education series, this article revisits the end-to-end journey from acquiring bank to issuing bank and back again. For payment card transactions, this is the core model: acceptance, issuance, and the payment network in between.

The goal is to show the end-to-end journey from acquiring bank to issuing bank and back again. While the standard flow for Visa (and most schemes) is straightforward, the journey highlights many potential problems that lead into more advanced processing topics.

Possible problems at early stages of processing

Transactions can fail before they even reach the issuer. VisaNet itself can reject messages due to formatting errors, or the acquirer's own systems may prevent the transaction from being sent correctly.

Acquirer transaction rejected

As covered in Part 1, a VisaNet rejection on the acquiring side means the transaction is rejected by VisaNet before reaching the issuer. Reject codes indicate the specific reason for rejection.

STIP processing scenarios

When the issuer is unavailable or slow to respond, STIP takes over. There are different STIP decision types — STIP C (decline) and STIP 4 (approve) — each with different implications for cardholders and issuers.

Perfect round trip with an approval

The ideal scenario: the transaction travels from the acquirer through VisaNet to the issuer, the issuer responds with an approval, and that approval travels back to the cardholder within the ATR time window.

For a deeper review of your authorization flows, contact Payment Authorization Expertise.