The merchant acquiring model has undergone many changes since the introduction of the first general-purpose credit card in 1958. Back then, acquiring banks were responsible for finding merchants and signing them up to accept consumer payments using those cards.
In the 1990s, independent sales organizations (ISOs) stepped in to enroll merchants. The advent of payment gateways in the late 1990s helped smaller merchants bring their businesses to the Internet but added an element of complexity: Payment gateways were the online version of ISOs, signing up online merchants and enabling them to accept digital transactions.