Principal members of Visa, Master card brands are the banks or financial institution that are authorized to acts as “issuing bank” that is they can provide credit cards and can act as “acquirers”, means the financial institution that provide transaction processing services.

The principal members are responsible to contact directly to the card brands that is VISA, MasterCard or others and settle the funds of those transactions.
Banks might ignore to work directly with them or ask for guarantee from any third party, if any high-risk businesses, like
gaming,
e-Cigarette,
pharmacy,
firearms,
adult products,
media productions,
start-up and more.

That’s where, these principal member “financial institutions” play a pivotal role by just cross checking the business documents and existence. If they find the business eligible for association, these institutions just ask for fulfillment of the minimum legal requirement that is generally required for establishment of merchant accounts.

These principal members have the capability to enable any business to process cards for any online business for which they can assist the merchant to get the access of virtual terminal to collect and authorize the payment. Many of such financial institutions have authority of accepting and exchanging the currency and have option for acquiring remote payments. These financial institutions are certified by Payment Card industry Data Security Standard Council (PCI DSS). This proves that they have secured data management systems deployed for their data management of card information.

The reason behind the merchants or corporate prefer to contact such financial institutions over the traditional banks to get access of a merchant account and virtual terminal is unlike banks, these financial institutions provide ample support to merchants, regarding any issue that merchant can face during authorization or funding of the transaction of money.

Plus, these institutions have some of the technologically advanced products that help merchants to analyze their business process, improve their working strategy and grow their business.
The other transaction related services that these financial institutions provide to merchants is notification about every transaction that is to be transferred to Merchant account for product or services that is ordered by the buyer.
They also help merchants to cross check the validity of the transactions which will ensure that the merchant have the safe environment while dealing the customers.

The most crucial support that these financial institutions provide to merchant or account owner is the notification about the cases of transactional disputes; that are also known as Chargeback.

Also help to mitigate those transactional disputes in a correct so the merchant should not lose the potential profits of their business due to incorrect or lack of knowledge.

As these financial institutions are dedicated for issuing card or processing transaction.

Most of their working is dedicated for card processing they have other business products that are specifically dedicated to providing services to merchants, business or corporate who look for keeping or transferring the payment (that is salary, business, gift, prepaid or any other such type of wallet cards) or accepting card payments. Many of these institutions have their own developed card authorization virtual gateway/terminal. All these financial institutions accept any type of card payment issued under the card brand VISA and MasterCard.