Payments Glossary

Industry and Migo-specific terminology.

Actors

Acquirer — The bank or financial institution that processes card transactions on behalf of a merchant. Migo operates as a payfac, sitting between merchants and acquirers.

Application — A backend caller identity in Migo. Each application has its own applicationId + secret pair and its own set of allowed operations.

Cardholder — An individual who owns a card issued via Migo. Cardholders are created by the CMS or via the Wallet Gateway POST /users endpoint.

Issuer — The bank that issues the card to the cardholder. Separate from the acquirer.

Merchant — A business accepting payments. In Migo data a merchant is modeled as a Business with one or more Branches and one or more Terminals.

Partner — A Migo customer who operates their own sub-tenancy — typically a neobank, fintech, or enterprise that uses Migo's APIs to serve their own downstream merchants / cardholders.

Processor — The technical service that talks to card networks and acquirers. Migo integrates multiple processors behind its APIs and routes each transaction to the appropriate one; the specific processor is an internal detail you do not select or see in the public contract.

Entities

Branch — A physical location of a Business. Has its own identifying code used in settlements.

Business — The merchant entity. Created from an approved Lead, owns branches and terminals.

Card — A tokenized physical card issued via Migo. Identified by cardId. Never expose the PAN directly.

Lead — A prospective merchant being onboarded. Captures KYC data and supporting documents. Converts to a Business once approved.

Plan — Subscription pricing configuration (amount, interval, trial). Defined once, reused across subscriptions.

Settlement — The matured, cleared state of a transaction — money has moved from the cardholder's bank to the merchant (less Migo's fee).

Subscription — An ongoing relationship that generates charges on a schedule or on demand. Backed by a payment method (card).

Terminal — A physical or virtual POS device tied to a Branch. Each terminal is provisioned against one or more processors.

Transaction — Any money movement: charge, refund, transfer, payout.

Flows

3-D Secure (3DS) — Card network authentication protocol. The cardholder is redirected to their bank's ACS to complete a challenge (biometric, OTP, etc.). Migo supports 3DS1 and 3DS2.

Auth + Capture (Two-step) — Reserve funds now (authorization) and capture (settle) later. Common in marketplaces, hospitality, car rental.

Conciliation — Reconciling Migo's transaction ledger against your internal ledger or the acquirer's settlement file. Payfac partners upload daily conciliation files.

One-step payment — Authorization + capture in a single request. The default for retail.

Payfac (Payment Facilitator) — Business model where Migo holds a master merchant agreement and sub-merchants (your merchants) operate under it. Enables fast onboarding without each merchant signing with an acquirer directly.

Tokenization — Replacing the PAN with a non-sensitive reference (cardId). Migo stores the PAN in the PCI-DSS scoped vault; you store the token.

Webhook — HTTP callback from Migo to your server on state changes. Protect your receiver with IP allowlisting; the Ed25519 signature scheme is a documented target standard but is not yet enforced end-to-end. See Go-live → Webhooks.

Money & precision

Decimal — Monetary amounts are stored with Decimal(20,4) precision (up to 20 digits, 4 decimal places). In request bodies and most responses they are decimal numbers (e.g. 150.5). Only some CMS report responses serialize amounts as strings — check each endpoint's schema. There is no "minor units" / integer-cents representation; amounts are decimal values.

Identifiers

applicationId — Your mobile application identifier (e.g. com.migo.ali). Used by the device-integrity flow via the applicationid HTTP header. Note: the Wallet Gateway POST /auth/login does not authenticate with this header — it uses a merchant identifier plus an Ed25519 signature.

cardId — Numeric internal identifier of a tokenized card (integer, e.g. 12345).

cardholderId — Numeric internal identifier of a cardholder (integer, CMS-managed).

commerceId / businessId — Numeric internal identifier of a Business (integer).

authUserId — Numeric internal identifier of an end-user (wallet app user). Distinct from CMS user.

cmsUserId — Numeric internal identifier of a CMS operator (Migo or partner employee).

partnerId / clientId — CMS string slugs (e.g. partner-123), not numeric.

externalId — Your own reference for a transaction or entity. Migo passes this back in webhooks and reports.