In this season of #TheShot, we follow a card payment past the checkout page, through gateways, acquiring processors and card networks, and ask what changes when some of those layers are removed. Direct-to-Scheme Processing connects to the card networks directly instead of through a chain of intermediaries.
Our guest is Anne Willem de Vries, Co-Founder & CEO of Silverflow, a cloud-native card processing platform. He explains why enterprises with highly optimized checkouts still depend on PSPs and acquirers, and what a direct connection changes for control, cost, speed to market and access to data.
For PSPs, PayFacs, ISOs and ISVs, the same logic applies one level up: every layer between them and the card networks adds cost, delay and data loss that their merchants end up feeling. How directly an operator connects to acquiring and the schemes determines how fast it can bring network features to its merchants and how much transaction data it can give back to them.