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Portfolio Hierarchy

Visa Acceptance consists of a three-level hierarchy for organization management:
  • Portfolio level
  • Merchant level
  • Transactional level
As a partner, you log in to the
Business Center
 at the
portfolio level
. You should organize your merchants within the
merchant level
 and
transactional level
. Each merchant and transactional account within a partner portfolio is given its own ID type to perform organizational tasks specific to its level.

Organization ID Types

Portfolio ID
A
portfolio ID
 is provided to you, the partner. Portfolio IDs enable partners to onboard merchants into a test or production environment.
Merchant ID
A
merchant ID
 (MID) represents the merchant on an account level and can store multiple transacting MIDs. It is directly associated with the merchant agreement and is created by the partner at the portfolio level. MIDs are configured to specific services, such as the Token Vault configuration, and have their own user administration, reporting, and aggregated views.
Transacting MID
A
transacting MID
 is the representative MID used for processing transactions. Each partner’s merchant can have multiple transacting MIDs. The transacting MID is typically the account that sends API requests with controlled authentication. Transacting MIDs are created by MIDs.
This figure shows how portfolio accounts, merchant accounts, and transactional accounts can be organized within the three-level hierarchy.

Figure:

Three-Level Hierarchy

Merchant Experience

Before you begin enabling merchants in your portfolio, consider how your merchants should be organized within the merchant-level and transaction-level hierarchy. Consider these aspects of the merchant experience:
  • Which users are processing transactions.
  • Which users are managing merchant onboarding and operations.
  • Which users manage ongoing updates to products.
You can test creating and managing merchant accounts and transactional accounts in the CAS environment before you enable merchants in your production environment.
When are you ready to begin enabling merchants, see Merchant Management Setup.