More insights
Co-founder Briqpay
October 1, 2026 at 01:00 PM
The same card, the same basket and the same shopper can get two different answers at checkout. If the payment reaches the shopper's bank from an acquirer in the shopper's own country, it is usually approved. If it arrives from an acquirer abroad, the bank looks at it more carefully, declines more often, and in some cases the merchant pays several times more for the privilege.
That is what local acquiring is about. This guide covers what it means, why cross-border card payments are declined more often, what the difference costs in the EU and between the UK and the EU, and how to set it up across the Nordics without building a separate integration for every country.
Every card payment involves four parties: the shopper's bank (the issuer), the merchant's bank or payment provider (the acquirer), the card scheme in between, and the merchant. The acquirer is the party that sends the payment for authorisation and settles the money to the merchant.
Local acquiring means the acquirer processing the payment is located in the same country, or the same region, as the bank that issued the card. A Finnish card acquired in Finland is a domestic transaction. A Finnish card acquired by an entity in another EU country is an intra-EEA cross-border transaction. A Finnish card acquired in the UK or the US is an inter-regional transaction.
To the shopper all three look identical. To the issuer, the card scheme and the merchant's invoice, they are three different transactions.
Local acquiring is not the same as offering local payment methods. Local payment methods are the options a shopper sees, such as Swish in Sweden, MobilePay in Denmark and Finland or bank payments in Finland. Local acquiring is about how the card and wallet payments in that list are processed behind the scenes. A good checkout for the Nordics needs both, and wallets matter here too: Apple Pay and Google Pay run on the underlying card, so they are acquired like any other card payment.
Issuers decline payments they consider risky, and the data gives them good reason to treat cross-border card payments as risky.
According to the EBA and ECB 2025 report on payment fraud, around 70% of card payment fraud in 2024 was related to cross-border transactions, in both value and volume. Remote card payments, which is to say online and app payments, accounted for around 83% of card fraud while making up only around 28% of the value of card transactions. The ECB's earlier card fraud report put the imbalance even more starkly: in 2021, cross-border transactions were 11% of the value of card payments but 63% of the value of card fraud.
An online payment from an acquirer abroad is therefore exactly the profile that issuers' risk models are built to stop. Adyen, one of the largest acquirers in Europe, describes the effect plainly in its guide to cross-border payments: issuing banks are more likely to flag a payment from a foreign acquirer as high-risk or unfamiliar, which leads to higher decline rates, while local acquiring results in higher approval rates.
A declined payment is not always a lost sale, but it is never free. In our own data on what happens after a failed payment, shoppers whose card payment failed and who went on to buy anyway spread their second attempt almost evenly across four different payment categories. The shoppers who did not try again are not in that data at all.
The EU Interchange Fee Regulation caps interchange on consumer cards at 0.2% of the transaction value for debit cards and 0.3% for credit cards. The cap applies whenever both the issuer and the acquirer are in the EEA, so a Swedish card acquired in Germany carries the same capped interchange as a Swedish card acquired in Sweden.
That means that inside the EEA, local acquiring is mainly about approval rates rather than interchange. The costs that do differ are the card schemes' own fees, which are typically higher for cross-border transactions, currency conversion when the acquirer settles in a different currency, and the cost of every payment that is declined and not retried. Commercial cards are a separate case: they are outside the regulation's caps, which matters for anyone selling to businesses by card.
The bigger gap is between the UK and the EU. Since the UK left the EU, online payments with EEA-issued consumer cards at UK merchants are no longer covered by the EU caps. The card schemes raised interchange on those payments from 0.2% and 0.3% to 1.15% for debit and 1.5% for credit, five to six times more, and the UK's Payment Systems Regulator estimates the increases cost UK businesses GBP 150 to 200 million a year.
The PSR wants to cap these fees. In January 2026 the High Court upheld its power to do so after a challenge by the card schemes, but in the regulator's 2026/27 plan, published in March, the level of the cap and its start date were still to be decided. Until a cap applies, a UK merchant selling to EU consumers through a UK acquirer pays the higher rate on every one of those payments. Whether a transaction counts as domestic, intra-EEA or inter-regional depends on where the card was issued and where the merchant is acquired, so for a UK merchant, acquiring EU cards inside the EU usually means having an EU entity and an acquirer that can process for it there.
Acquiring matters most where cards and wallets carry most of the checkout. In our own consumer checkout data the share varies enormously across the markets Nordic merchants sell into:
| Market | Card + wallet share of consumer checkouts |
|---|---|
| United Kingdom | 93% |
| Denmark | 84% |
| Germany | 79% |
| Netherlands | 28% |
| Sweden | 16% |
In the UK, Denmark and Germany, card and wallet payments are almost the whole checkout, so the acquiring setup decides the approval rate of nearly every purchase. In Sweden, where buy now pay later, invoice and Swish carry most of the volume, it matters for a smaller slice, but that slice includes the international shoppers who are most likely to be declined. In Finland, where bank payments are the default, cards and wallets carry a smaller share of the checkout than in Denmark, but they are still where international shoppers end up. We cover the Finnish mix in our guide to payment gateways in Finland and the Swedish one in our guide to payment gateways in Sweden.
Most merchants do not know, because the checkout looks the same either way. Four checks answer the question:
There are two ways to get there.
One acquirer with local entities everywhere. Some large acquirers hold licences or entities in many European countries and can process each card domestically. It keeps the setup simple, but you are tied to one provider's coverage, pricing and outages in every market at once.
Different acquirers in different markets. A merchant can use a strong domestic acquirer in each of its main countries and route each market's payments to it. This usually gives the best local approval rates and pricing, but without an orchestration layer it means one integration, one contract and one settlement file per provider.
Either way, three things make the difference in practice:
This is the problem payment orchestration solves. With Briqpay, merchants connect several acquirers, PSPs and local payment methods through one integration, keep their own agreements with each provider, and decide per market, currency or order value which provider handles the payment. Adding a local acquirer for a new country, or swapping one that is underperforming, becomes configuration rather than a project. Our post on what actually reduces checkout costs and cart abandonment explains the mechanics, and the full list of connected providers and methods is on our payment methods page.
What is local acquiring? Local acquiring means card payments are processed by an acquirer in the same country or region as the bank that issued the card, so the issuer sees a domestic transaction rather than a cross-border one.
Does local acquiring lower interchange fees in the EU? For consumer cards inside the EEA, mostly not: the Interchange Fee Regulation caps interchange at 0.2% for debit and 0.3% for credit whether the payment is domestic or cross-border within the EEA. The savings come from higher approval rates, lower cross-border scheme fees and avoided currency conversion. Between the UK and the EU the difference is much larger, with 1.15% and 1.5% interchange on cross-border online payments.
Which payment provider offers local acquiring in Finland or Sweden? Several international and Nordic acquirers process Finnish and Swedish cards domestically, but coverage differs by provider and by card type. Ask each provider where Finnish and Swedish cards are acquired, get it in writing, and compare their approval rates on cards from each country. With an orchestration layer you can use a different acquirer per market rather than choosing one for all of them.
Is local acquiring the same as local payment methods? No. Local payment methods are what the shopper chooses, such as Swish, MobilePay or Finnish bank payments. Local acquiring is how card and wallet payments are processed behind the scenes. Most Nordic merchants need both.
Does local acquiring matter for Apple Pay and Google Pay? Yes. Wallet payments run on the underlying card, so they are acquired, authorised and priced like card payments.
Methodology note: The card and wallet shares come from Briqpay's own consumer (B2C) checkout data, with internal test transactions excluded: Sweden January to September 2026, Denmark February to September 2026, and the United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands an autumn 2025 baseline (1 October to 9 November 2025). Payment methods are grouped by category; we do not name individual providers and we report shares, not volumes. Fee levels and regulatory status reflect the public sources above at the time of writing and are not legal or financial advice.
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