The payments industry runs on jargon — gateway, processor, acquirer, tokenization, interchange, PayFac. This glossary defines the terms you'll meet around the NMI gateway, each in a sentence or two, so the rest of this site reads more clearly.
NMI & payment gateway terms
- Acquirer
- The bank or processor that holds the merchant's account and settles card transactions with the card networks. The NMI gateway routes transactions to whichever acquirer the merchant's account uses.
- AVS (Address Verification Service)
- A check that compares the billing address entered at checkout against the card issuer's records. A mismatch can flag or decline a transaction and is one of the gateway's built-in fraud filters.
- Card-on-file
- A stored, tokenized card that a merchant can charge again without re-entering it — the basis for repeat purchases and subscriptions. On NMI it lives in the Customer Vault.
- CVV filtering
- Verification of the three- or four-digit card-security code. Requiring and checking CVV reduces some fraud, though it does not by itself prevent chargebacks.
- Customer Vault
- NMI's tokenization service. It stores card data as tokens in a PCI-compliant vault so merchants can bill repeat and recurring customers without holding card numbers.
- EMV
- The chip-card standard (named for Europay, Mastercard, Visa). EMV chip and contactless acceptance shifts certain counterfeit-fraud liability and is the expected standard for card-present sales.
- Gateway
- The software layer that captures, encrypts, tokenizes, and screens a card transaction, then routes it to a processor. NMI is a gateway, not a processor.
- Interchange
- The fee set by the card networks and paid to the issuing bank on each transaction. "Interchange-plus" pricing passes interchange through at cost plus a transparent margin.
- ISO (Independent Sales Organization)
- A company that resells merchant accounts and payment services, often branding a white-label gateway like NMI as its own.
- ISV (Independent Software Vendor)
- A software company that embeds payments into its product, typically via a gateway's API and SDKs.
- iSpyFraud
- NMI's rules-based fraud-screening module, letting merchants block, hold, or review transactions by custom conditions.
- Merchant Central
- The NMI gateway's merchant-facing dashboard — Virtual Terminal, reporting, the Customer Vault, recurring billing, and user management.
- MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication)
- A second sign-in factor (an authenticator-app code or hardware key) on top of a password, used to protect gateway accounts where the reseller enables it.
- P2PE (Point-to-Point Encryption)
- Encryption of card data inside the terminal hardware, decrypted only at a secure endpoint, so plaintext card data never touches the merchant's network.
- PayFac (Payment Facilitator)
- A provider that aggregates many sub-merchants under its own master account, simplifying onboarding. NMI supports the PayFac model for partners.
- PCI DSS
- The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. Tokenization and hosted/iframe checkout reduce a merchant's PCI scope and the burden of compliance.
- Processor
- The entity that clears funds with Visa, Mastercard, and other networks and moves money to the merchant's bank. Distinct from the gateway, which sits in front of it.
- Recurring billing
- Scheduled, automatic charges against a stored token — the mechanism behind subscriptions, memberships, and installment plans.
- Tokenization
- Replacing a card number with a non-sensitive token that stands in for it. The token can be charged again but is useless if stolen, shrinking PCI scope.
- <a href="/usaepay-login/">USAePay</a>
- A payment gateway owned by NMI (acquired 2021), run as a separate brand with its own console at nmi.com/logins.
- Virtual Terminal
- A browser-based form for keying card transactions by hand — used for phone, mail-order, and B2B payments where the card is not present.
- White-label
- A product sold under a reseller's brand rather than the maker's. NMI's gateway is white-label, which is why most merchants use it under another company's name.