Merchant Acquiring Insights and Trends
TSG’s Directory of U.S. Merchant Acquirers, sponsored by Chargeback Gurus, is a report that includes vital business statistics on more than 300 of the nation’s payment players that collectively process 95%+ of all card payment volume in the United States.
When looking at the data inside this report, a variety of merchant-acquiring insights stand out:
- The top five players processed an estimated $7.5 trillion in card volume in 2023. All five players have a strong bank sales channel, as they are either bank-owned or have bank partners/clients from other areas of their business. Over 60% of the volume represented in the directory is processed by these top five players, and almost 90% of the volume represented in the directory is processed by the top twenty-five listed players.
- Looking at the top-ranked companies, JPMorgan Chase & Co. ranks first for estimated U.S. total processing volume at $2.4T and total transactions at 46.2B. Stripe ranks first for estimated U.S. total number of merchants at nearly 3.8M. Access key data on the top ten.
- Authorize.net (a Visa solution) is the payment gateway with the most partnerships among the acquirers listed, partnering with 42% of these players, a similar percentage as last year.
- 38% of the players listed sell Fiserv’s Clover point-of-sale products. This is up from 35% of providers that listed Clover as an available smart POS offering.
- Having over 3 million domestic clients is impressive – only Square and Stripe hit that threshold, though micro-merchants in those figures may not perform strongly for these players.
- With its sole focus on one vertical (albeit a big one), Toast continues to amass a considerable market share, registering as the 15th largest provider by processing volume.
- At nearly 27% market share of sponsor banks in terms of relationships, Wells Fargo continues to be the most utilized.
- There are ~50 entities that process over $20B in annual volume in the U.S. market, showing the industry’s high competitiveness.
- 50% of the acquirers in the directory have an in-house or white-labeled payment gateway, showing the competitive nature of the gateway landscape. These players will be able to control features, development roadmap, and pricing more than entities without a solution.
- 38% of acquirers that generate between $10B – $50B leverage the financial institution channel for at least part of their distribution. 31% of all listed providers were identified as leveraging the financial institution channel to some extent.
- 42% of providers have more than one sponsor bank relationship.
- California remained the most common headquarters state for the top 25 players and throughout the ~310 acquirers listed within the directory.
- 43% of all providers directly marketed the existence of a surcharging or cash discounting/dual pricing program.
General Commentary: Merchant Acquiring Insights
In the continually evolving merchant acquiring landscape, 2023 marked a year of continued transition towards greater utilization of technology as digital wallets continued to gain adoption and remain the most utilized eCommerce payment method, contactless payments usage continued to rise as more merchants adopted tap-to-pay POS touch points, embedded finance offerings continue to proliferate the merchant acquiring community, and omnichannel becomes a necessary afterthought for all merchants who are striving to achieve their highest potential.
Amongst this change, institutional stalwarts of the industry continue to face competition from emerging, integrated focused entrants as both grapple with internal and external obstacles to implement this technology in an efficient, logical, and cost-effective manner to a merchant base that is increasingly beset with an overwhelming amount of choice when it comes to payment processing. The industry may be at a pinnacle saturation point as volume growth estimates have slowed post-pandemic. The combined consumer credit purchase volume of Visa and Mastercard increased only ~7% in the U.S. YoY, an amount that habitually increased by 9% in the pre-pandemic period of 2015-2019. Future market growth estimates from industry participants appear to also continue to slow – Worldpay’s recently released 2024 Global Payments report cites a combined U.S. POS/eCom 2023-2027 processing volume CAGR of only ~3.4%, a worrying prospect as increasing overall inflation should theoretically be helping to propel payments volume forward as rising prices should equate to higher payment volume amounts all other variables constant.
All said, the combined volume growth of payment providers listed in TSG’s Directory of U.S. Merchant Acquirers last year and this year was nearly 10%, with notable examples such as Stripe, Shopify, and Toast each increasing their total U.S. Payment volumes by well over 40% YoY.
Further, the strategic future of the ecosystem appears to be in an uncertain flux as news of Capital One’s plans to acquire Discover earlier this year has already sent M&A shockwaves throughout the industry as pundits scramble to determine how this acquisition from a dominant issuing player will affect the future of one of the largest payment networks. As interest rates continue to remain higher than prior years for the near future, entities in the space continue to prioritize profitability over growth generation at all costs, indicating that uncertain but exciting times continue to be ahead for participants in the industry for 2024.
If you have questions or would like to learn more about the Directory of U.S. Merchant Acquirers, please contact us or email our eReports team at ereports@tsgpayments.com.
Note: All entities acknowledged within this article and most represented within the referenced companion report are believed to own a portfolio of merchant accounts or hold a strategic interest in the management of their merchants’ internal payment processing functions, to the extent that they merit inclusion as a “merchant acquirer.” Ex. Square possesses multiple service provider registrations through Visa, including as a payment facilitator and as a registered ISO.