The Companies Involved In Payment Transactions When Consumers Buy Items

When consumers pay for products and services, today they have a wide variety of options. To make these options work, a variety of companies are involved behind the scenes in the payment transactions: the companies money and information flow through after a consumer purchases something at the checkout register. Consumers may not realize the wide variety of different companies involved.

Companies involved in the payment transactions flow often have their onw privacy policy, and data collection of consumers' sensitive information -- driven by their agreement with the retailer or bank. And, each company involved may experience data breaches where consumers' sensitive information is exposed or stolen:

	Payment Method
Company Type	Cash	Credit Card	Debit Card	Retailer's Prepaid Card (1)	Bank Prepaid Card (2)	Prepaid Card: FSA (3)	Smart Phone
Brick-&-mortar retail store	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Online retail website	n/a	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	n/a
Retailer's partners &/or affiliates (4)	n/a	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Your bank	n/a	Yes	Yes	n/a	Yes	Yes	Yes
Retailer's bank	n/a	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Payments Processor (5)	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes (6)	Yes	Yes
Your Employer	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	Yes	Yes	Yes
Healthcare Vendor (7)	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	No	Yes	n/a
Wireless Provider	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	Yes
Mobile Device Manufacturer	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	Yes
Mobile Device Operating System Developer (8)	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	Yes
Mobile App Developer (8)	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	Yes
App Store	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	Yes

Footnotes:

1. Includes gift cards offered by retailers that are good only at that retailer's stores.
2. Includes general-purpose prepaid cards usually offered by banks
3. Includes prepaid cards used by employers to adminster healthcare Flexible Spending Accounts
4. Includes outsourced vendors that administer a retailer's email marketing programs, cloud-based storage services, customer relationship management databases, mobile marketing services, product fulfillment, and/or data mining services; plus companies that perform co-marketing campaigns
5. The bank and/or company that processes the debit/credit card transactions
6. Applies to employers that pay employees via a payroll debit cards
7. Some employers outsource the administration of their healthcare Flexible Spending Account (FSA) program to an external vendor, and issue participating employees a special prepaid card
8. The company that develops and maintains this software mobile devices

What do you think about the above chart?

Comments

[Joe]

Data breaches are possible in many areas. This is a good article to raise awareness of just how vulnerable your credit card safety is during a transaction.