Reference · Singapore

Payments glossary

The words a merchant meets while comparing providers, defined plainly and without a sales angle. These describe the industry, not this company — where a definition has a Uniweb Pay-specific fact attached, it is marked separately so you can skip it.

Who does what

Acquirer

The licensed institution that holds a merchant’s account, accepts card and wallet payments on the merchant’s behalf, and settles the money to them. It is the party with the licence, the party the money passes through, and the party the merchant calls when a payment goes wrong. A merchant contracts with an acquirer; they do not contract with the card schemes or the wallets directly.

Issuer

The bank that gave the shopper their card, as opposed to the acquirer that serves the merchant. The two halves of a card transaction are called issuing and acquiring, and most institutions do one of them. The issuer decides whether to approve a payment; the acquirer cannot overrule that decision.

Payment gateway

The technical layer that carries a payment request from a website, app or terminal to the acquirer. It moves data; it does not hold a merchant account and it does not settle money. The word is used loosely — many companies sold as "payment gateways" are actually acquirers, resellers or both — which is why the question to ask is who holds the licence and who pays you, not what the product is called.

PSP (payment service provider)

An umbrella term for any company in the chain between a shopper and a merchant’s bank account — acquirers, gateways, aggregators and resellers all get called one. Because it covers all of them, it tells a merchant almost nothing on its own.

Card scheme

The network a card belongs to and the rulebook both the issuer and the acquirer operate under: Visa, Mastercard, American Express, UnionPay, Diners Club and Discover are the six a Singapore merchant meets. Accepting "cards" is really accepting some subset of those six, and which subset is a commercial decision, not a technical one.

Aggregator

A provider that puts many small merchants under one master merchant account rather than underwriting each one. It is what makes same-day signup possible, and the trade-off is that the merchant does not hold the account: terms, limits and the decision to stop serving a merchant sit with the aggregator.

Reseller

A company that sells payment acceptance under its own brand while the licence, the merchant account and the settlement belong to somebody else. The arrangement is common and legitimate. What matters to a merchant is knowing it: the entity named in the merchant agreement, not the brand on the proposal, is the one whose licence and obligations actually apply.

Payment facilitator (PayFac)

A company that signs merchants under its own acquiring relationship and takes responsibility for them, so each merchant becomes a sub-merchant rather than holding their own account. It is the model behind sign-up-in-an-afternoon onboarding. The facilitator carries the underwriting and the risk, which is why it also sets the limits, the settlement terms and the decision to stop serving a sub-merchant.

Payment orchestration

A layer that routes transactions across more than one acquirer or provider, usually to improve approval rates or to avoid depending on a single one. It is an enterprise pattern: it only pays for itself at a volume where a percentage point of approval rate is worth more than the cost of running two relationships, and below that it is a second system to maintain for no gain.

Licensing and regulation in Singapore

MAS (Monetary Authority of Singapore)

Singapore’s central bank and integrated financial regulator. It licenses payment institutions under the Payment Services Act 2019 and publishes the register of who holds which licence.

Payment Services Act 2019

The Singapore statute that payment institutions are licensed under. It defines the regulated activities — merchant acquisition, domestic and cross-border money transfer, e-money issuance and others — and a licence names which of them a company may do. A licence covering money transfer does not permit merchant acquiring.

MPI (Major Payment Institution)

The higher of the two licence tiers under the Payment Services Act 2019; the lower is Standard Payment Institution. The tier follows transaction volume thresholds and brings correspondingly heavier obligations, including safeguarding of customer money.

For Uniweb Pay specifically: Uniweb Pte Ltd holds an MPI licence, No. PS20200612, with merchant acquisition named in its licensed scope.

SPI (Standard Payment Institution)

The lower of the two Payment Services Act licence tiers, for institutions below the volume thresholds that trigger MPI status. It is a real licence, not a lesser one in kind — but the tier is worth reading off the register rather than off a homepage that says only "MAS licensed".

MAS Financial Institutions Directory

The regulator’s own public register of licensed institutions, at eservices.mas.gov.sg/fid. It is the authoritative answer to "is this provider licensed, at what tier, and for which activities" — and it is free to search, which makes taking a provider’s word for it a choice rather than a necessity.

KYC / KYB

Know Your Customer and Know Your Business — the identity and business checks a licensed institution is required to perform before opening a merchant account. In practice: business registration, identification for the people who own and control the business, and evidence of what the business actually sells. There is no regulated merchant account in Singapore that skips them.

Beneficial owner

The natural person who ultimately owns or controls a business, as opposed to a holding company named on the registration. Identification for every beneficial owner is a standard requirement, and a missing one is among the most common reasons a merchant account application stalls.

PCI DSS

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard — the card schemes’ rules for handling cardholder data. What a merchant has to do under it depends mostly on whether card data ever touches their own systems: a shop using a supplied terminal, or a website using a hosted checkout page, carries far less of it than one that captures card numbers itself.

Merchant Acquisition (licensed activity)

The activity, named in a Payment Services Act licence, of accepting card and wallet payments on a merchant’s behalf. It is the specific permission a merchant should look for when checking a provider in the MAS register — a company licensed for money transfer or e-money issuance is licensed, and not for this. Licensed scope describes what an institution may do, not what it sells.

For Uniweb Pay specifically: Uniweb Pte Ltd’s licence names Merchant Acquisition in its scope, alongside Domestic Money Transfer and Cross-border Money Transfer. What this site publishes as a merchant service is acquiring, settled in SGD; do not read the other two as published products.

UEN (Unique Entity Number)

The single identifier every entity registered in Singapore has — companies, sole proprietorships, societies and government bodies alike. It is what identifies a business across government agencies and across most commercial onboarding, and it is the first field on almost every merchant application.

ACRA

The Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority, Singapore's registrar of companies. It holds the record of who a business is: its registered name, its UEN, its officers and its shareholders. An ACRA business profile is the document most merchant applications ask for, because it is the authoritative answer to questions an applicant could otherwise answer any way they liked.

PDPA (Personal Data Protection Act)

Singapore's personal data law. It governs how an organisation may collect, use and disclose personal data, requires it to be protected, and gives individuals rights to access and correct what is held about them. It applies to a merchant's own customer data — a mailing list, a booking system, a loyalty programme — independently of anything a payment provider does.

AML / CFT

Anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism: the obligations a licensed financial institution carries to know who its customers are, to understand what their business does, and to monitor for activity that does not fit. They are the reason onboarding asks questions that feel unrelated to accepting a card, and they are not optional for any licensed provider.

How a payment moves

Authorisation

The issuer’s real-time decision to approve a payment and hold the amount against the shopper’s available balance or credit. It is not the money moving — it is the promise that the money is there.

Capture

The step that turns an authorisation into an actual claim for the money. At a shop counter authorisation and capture happen together and a merchant never sees them as separate; online they are often split, so that a merchant can authorise at checkout and capture when the goods ship.

Settlement

The transfer of a period’s takings, net of fees, from the acquirer into the merchant’s bank account. The three questions that decide what settlement is worth to a business are which currency, on what cycle, and into how many accounts — and all three are usually harder to renegotiate later than the rate is.

T+1 settlement

Funds for a day’s takings are settled in the batch on the following day, rather than weekly or monthly. "T" is the transaction day. Longer cycles are common and are a working-capital cost rather than a fee.

For Uniweb Pay specifically: Uniweb Pay settles in SGD in T+1 batches, with in-store, online and in-app takings in the same batch.

Batch

A group of transactions settled together as one payout. A merchant reconciles against the batch, not against individual sales, which is why a provider that settles different payment methods in different batches creates more daily work than the rate difference usually justifies.

Reconciliation

Matching what the till says was taken against what actually arrived in the bank account. It is the daily admin cost of accepting payment, and it scales with the number of separate accounts, statements and settlement cycles a merchant is running — not with turnover.

Chargeback

A cardholder disputes a transaction with their issuer and the amount is reversed out of the merchant’s account pending the outcome. It is a scheme process with deadlines and evidence requirements, and it is distinct from a refund, which the merchant chooses to give.

Refund vs void

A void cancels a transaction before it settles, so nothing ever moves. A refund reverses one that has already settled, so money goes out. Which one applies depends on timing, and whether counter staff can do either on the device — rather than raising a support ticket — is a practical thing to test on a demo.

Pre-authorisation (hold)

An authorisation placed on a card to reserve an amount without taking it, later either captured or released. It is how hotels, car hire and similar trades cover a deposit or incidental spend. The mechanics — how long a hold may stand, and how a release reaches the cardholder’s available balance — are set by the card schemes and the issuer rather than by the merchant.

For Uniweb Pay specifically: This site does not publish whether or how pre-authorisation works on Uniweb Pay’s acceptance. For an accommodation provider that is the most consequential question in choosing an acquirer, and it should be answered in writing before signing — with any provider.

Issuer decline

A refusal by the bank that issued the customer’s card, not by the merchant’s terminal or acquirer. Common on unusually large or unusually located transactions, where the issuer is querying whether the cardholder is really the one spending. Neither the merchant nor the acquirer can overrule it; the resolution is the cardholder contacting their own bank.

Merchant descriptor

The text that identifies a merchant on the cardholder’s statement. When it does not resemble the shop the customer actually visited, the customer’s first move is to query the charge with their bank rather than with the merchant — which turns a phone call into a dispute. It is one of the few dispute controls that costs nothing to get right.

3-D Secure

The card scheme mechanism for authenticating a cardholder during an online payment, moving the authentication step to the issuer. Whether and how it is applied to a given checkout is a matter for whoever operates that checkout, and it interacts with both fraud exposure and how many customers complete the payment.

Tokenisation

Replacing a card number with a substitute value — a token — that stands in for it in a merchant's systems and is useless anywhere else. It is what allows a business to recognise a returning customer, or to charge a saved card, without the card number ever being stored on its side. It is the single largest lever a merchant has on PCI DSS scope.

Card on file

A card the customer has agreed may be charged again later, stored as a token rather than as a number. It is what sits behind a saved payment method, a subscription and a "charge my card on collection" arrangement. What makes it legitimate is the agreement: the customer has to have consented to the later charge, and the record of that consent is what answers a dispute about it.

Payment link

A one-off URL that opens a payment page hosted by the provider, usually carrying the amount and a reference. The merchant sends it — in a message, on an invoice, by email — and the customer pays on a page the merchant does not run. It is the standard way to take a card payment without a website, and because the card is entered on the provider's page it keeps card data out of the merchant's systems.

ARN (acquirer reference number)

The identifier a transaction carries through the scheme network, used to trace one specific payment or refund between the acquirer and the issuer. It is what a merchant is asked for when a customer says a refund never arrived: with it, the customer's own bank can find the money.

Representment

The acquirer re-presenting a charged-back transaction to the issuer, with the merchant's evidence attached, arguing that the original payment was valid. It is the merchant's reply in a dispute, it happens inside a time limit, and it is decided on the documents submitted rather than on the argument made.

Chargeback ratio

A merchant's chargebacks measured against their transactions over a period. The schemes monitor it and run programmes for merchants who exceed their thresholds, which can bring extra costs and conditions. The number that matters is the merchant's own trend rather than any single month, because a ratio climbing steadily is a problem long before it crosses anything.

At the counter

Card present / card not present

Whether the card or phone was physically at the terminal. Card-present acceptance carries less fraud risk and generally costs less than card-not-present acceptance, which covers online and in-app payments. It is the single largest structural driver of what a merchant pays.

EMV

The chip-card standard that chip-and-PIN and contactless card payments run on, named after Europay, Mastercard and Visa. A terminal described as EMV-capable takes chip cards; magnetic stripe is a separate, older path that some cards still need.

Contactless

Tap-to-pay over NFC, whether from a card or from a phone wallet. From the terminal’s point of view a contactless card and a phone are the same transaction; from the shopper’s they are the fastest way through a queue.

Merchant-presented QR / consumer-presented QR

The two directions a QR payment can run. Merchant-presented: the terminal displays a code and the shopper scans it. Consumer-presented: the shopper shows the payment code in their wallet app and the terminal scans them. A setup that supports only one direction slows a queue down, because which one happens is up to the customer.

Smart terminal

An Android-based payment device that takes cards and QR wallets on the same unit and can run applications, as opposed to a fixed-function card reader. The practical difference at a counter is one device, one account behind it, and one reconciliation at the end of the day.

For Uniweb Pay specifically: Uniweb Pay’s is a Sunmi P3: contactless, chip and insert, magnetic stripe and QR wallets on one unit, with thermal receipt printing and 4G or Wi-Fi.

MCC (merchant category code)

A four-digit code the schemes use to classify what a merchant sells. It is assigned at underwriting, it influences pricing and which scheme rules apply, and it is one of the things a business profile that does not match the website will get wrong.

Magnetic stripe

The oldest of the three card entry methods, and the weakest — the stripe carries static data where chip and contactless carry cryptographic authentication. It remains worth supporting in a market with many overseas visitors, because some cards a visitor is carrying still require it and the alternative is a sale that cannot be completed at all.

Consumer-presented QR

The QR direction in which the shopper displays a payment code from their wallet app and the merchant’s device scans it — the mirror image of merchant-presented QR, where the terminal shows a code carrying the amount. Which direction happens is the customer’s choice, so a counter that supports only one turns some proportion of transactions into a negotiation.

MID (merchant ID)

The number identifying a merchant account to the acquirer and the schemes. A business can have more than one — commonly one per outlet, or per channel — and how they are arranged decides whether reporting arrives combined or separately. It is the reference to quote when contacting a provider about anything account-level.

Tap to phone (SoftPOS)

Accepting a contactless card or wallet directly on a standard phone, using its NFC hardware, with no separate terminal. It removes the device cost and suits low-volume or occasional acceptance; what it does not remove is the merchant account behind it, and it inherits the phone's battery and connectivity rather than a terminal's.

CVM (cardholder verification method)

How a transaction confirms the person paying is entitled to the card: a PIN, a signature, the phone's own biometric, or nothing at all below a contactless threshold. Which one applies is decided by the card, the terminal and the amount together, not by the merchant — which is why the same card sometimes asks for a PIN and sometimes does not.

Tip adjust

Changing the amount of an already-authorised transaction before the batch closes, to add a gratuity written on a docket after the card was presented. It is a restaurant workflow rather than a general one, it is bounded by the batch cut-off, and whether it is available depends on the terminal and the account setup rather than on the card.

The methods themselves

PayNow

Singapore’s real-time transfer service, run between the participating banks. Consumers use it to send money by phone number or NRIC; businesses use it to be paid by UEN, and merchant QR acceptance is built on the same rail.

Dynamic PayNow

A PayNow QR generated per sale, carrying the exact amount, with a payment-success notification back to the merchant. That is the whole difference from a static sticker, and it is the difference between a payment the till confirms and a payment a staff member confirms by looking at a screenshot.

Static PayNow

A printed PayNow QR with no amount in it. The shopper keys the amount in themselves, and the merchant has no automatic confirmation — which is why it works for a stall and stops working the moment there is a queue or a staff member who is not the owner.

SGQR

Singapore’s shared national QR label, which combines multiple payment schemes into one printed code. It is a labelling standard rather than a payment method, and it is commonly confused with Dynamic PayNow, which is a different thing.

For Uniweb Pay specifically: Uniweb Pay offers Dynamic PayNow. It does not offer SGQR.

Alipay+

Alipay’s cross-border gateway. One enablement reaches mainland Alipay users and a set of partner wallets from other Asian markets, so it covers more shoppers than mainland Alipay alone. On a merchant account it appears as one payment method and settles like the rest of them.

WeChat Pay

The payment function inside WeChat, and one of the two wallets Chinese visitors reach for by default. A Singapore merchant enables it through an acquirer, not by signing up with WeChat — there is no merchant sign-up page for a Singapore business.

UnionPay

China’s card scheme, and also a QR rail — Chinese customers use it both ways, and enabling only the card side leaves the other half unserved. It is the scheme Singapore merchants most often forget to enable.

E-wallet

A payment app holding a balance or a linked funding source, paid from a phone rather than a card. Apple Pay and Google Pay pass an underlying card to the terminal and are accepted wherever contactless cards are; Alipay+, WeChat Pay and UnionPay QR are separate rails a merchant enables individually.

NETS

A Singapore domestic payment network, long-established and widely recognised locally, covering debit at the point of sale and QR payments. It is a separate scheme from the international card networks, so accepting it is a separate arrangement from accepting Visa, Mastercard or the wallets — a merchant can have any combination of them.

For Uniweb Pay specifically: NETS is not among the payment methods Uniweb Pay publishes as accepted. What Uniweb Pay accepts is listed on the payment methods index: the six card schemes, Apple Pay and Google Pay, Alipay+, WeChat Pay, UnionPay QR and Dynamic PayNow. If NETS acceptance is a requirement for your counter, that is a real reason to look at a provider that offers it.

FAST

Singapore's interbank transfer service for near-immediate transfers between accounts at participating banks. PayNow is the layer that sits on top of it and lets a transfer be addressed to a mobile number or a UEN rather than to an account number — which is why a PayNow payment behaves like a transfer and not like a card.

What it costs, and what gets measured

MDR (merchant discount rate)

The percentage of a transaction a merchant pays to accept it. It is not one number: it moves with card present versus not present, debit versus consumer credit versus commercial, and whether the card was issued locally or abroad. A quote given without anyone asking about that mix is a quote that will be revised.

For Uniweb Pay specifically: Uniweb Pay quotes rates per merchant and does not publish them. Several Singapore providers do publish theirs, and if comparing public rate cards before speaking to anyone is what you need, that is a real reason to look at them.

Interchange

The portion of a card fee that goes from the acquirer to the issuer, set by the scheme rather than by either party. It is the floor under any rate, which is why no provider can price below it and why a rate depends on which cards a merchant actually takes.

GMV (gross merchandise value)

The total value of sales before fees, refunds and chargebacks. Useful for sizing a business; misleading as a measure of what actually reached the bank account.

Merchant account

The account a licensed acquirer opens in a merchant’s name to receive card and wallet payments before settling them to the merchant’s bank. Whether a provider gives a merchant their own account or places them under a shared one is the difference between an acquirer and an aggregator, and it decides who controls the terms.

Effective rate

Total fees for a period divided by total gross takings for the same period, with every non-percentage line item folded in — rentals, minimums, administration charges. It is the only figure that is comparable between two providers, because a headline percentage says nothing about what else is being charged or about the mix it is applied to.

Per-transaction fee

A fixed amount charged on each transaction regardless of its size, usually quoted alongside a percentage. Its weight depends entirely on the average ticket: negligible on a large sale, and frequently the majority of what a merchant pays on a small one. It is the number a small-basket merchant should focus on, and the one a headline percentage hides.

Blended rate

One percentage applied across every transaction regardless of card type or entry method. Simple to read and simple to forecast, and it conceals which of a merchant’s transactions are expensive — which is fine while the transaction mix is stable and a problem when it is not.

Interchange-plus

A pricing shape that quotes the acquirer’s margin separately from the pass-through cost, so a statement shows what went to the issuer and the scheme and what went to the provider. Harder to read than a blended rate, and the only shape that lets a merchant tell whether a change in cost came from their provider or from their own customers.

Cross-border interchange

The higher interchange band that applies when the card was issued in a different country from the merchant. It is set by the card scheme, not by the acquirer, which is why a merchant serving overseas visitors genuinely costs more to serve on the card rails than one serving only local cardholders — on identical commercial terms.

Net settlement

Paying a merchant their sales less the fees, as one figure, rather than paying the full amount and invoicing the fees separately. Both arrangements exist and neither is better in itself — but they produce very different books, so it is worth knowing which one a quote assumes before comparing it to another.

Rolling reserve

A portion of a merchant's settlement held back for a defined period and released on a rolling basis, used where a provider is exposed to future disputes — typically businesses that take payment well before delivery. It is a risk instrument rather than a fee: the money is the merchant's and is released, but it is not available when they expected it, which makes it a cash-flow question.

Surcharge

An additional amount added to a transaction because of how the customer chose to pay. Whether a merchant may apply one is governed by their acquiring agreement, which passes down the card schemes' rules — so it is a question with a specific answer per merchant rather than a general one. Separately from whether it is permitted, it has to be disclosed before the customer commits.

Last updated: 2026-08-03 · 74 terms

Written by the Uniweb Pay team, Singapore. Licence details are checked against the MAS Financial Institutions Directory, which is the authoritative source — where anything here disagrees with the register, the register wins.