Launch merchant acquiring under your own brand in twelve weeks
D-PAY is the white-label acquiring platform from Determinds that a bank deploys to run merchant acquiring as its own business. You keep the brand, the merchant relationship, and the acquirer-of-record position under your own license, and Determinds supplies the platform, the local rails, and one accountable team.
01 The business case
Acquiring succeeds on the operations around the gateway
Payment processing is one part of a successful acquiring business, and the most familiar one.
The larger part is the operational machinery around it: merchant onboarding and know-your-customer checks at volume, pricing that serves an SME and an enterprise merchant from the same platform, support, dispute handling against scheme deadlines, and reporting a regulator will accept. D-PAY delivers that machinery, so a bank can serve high-volume small merchants with the same strength it brings to credit, which is the commercial case for acquiring as a service.
Acquiring brings a bank three sources of value. Fee revenue on every merchant transaction is annuity income that grows with merchant volume, and merchant deposits are low-cost funding, because an acquiring merchant keeps a current account with the bank. Transaction volume, settlement regularity, and dispute behavior are also the best available credit data on a small business, so the payment flow becomes the lending flow.
02 Built by Determinds, with embedded processing
One contract, one integration surface, and one accountable team
Built and owned by Determinds
- The orchestration core, and the single integration surface your teams work against
- Merchant lifecycle: onboarding wizard, KYC with maker-checker control, instant National ID and Commercial Register verification, hierarchy and multi-branch, suspension and termination, and an immutable audit trail on every entity
- Pricing engine: blended, interchange-plus, and tiered rates with per-scheme rate cards
- Bank back office for operations, risk, and compliance, plus provider sub-portals with segregated views
- Value-added acceptance: hosted checkout, QR to the Meeza specification with local settlement reconciliation, pay-by-link, bulk links, and electronic invoicing
- Local rails: Fawry bill payments for utility, telecom, and government billers, with biller catalog, inquiry, and receipts, and installment credit through valU, Sympl, and Contact, with one eligibility call that queries all three at once
- Merchant financing: eligibility from collected volume, settlement regularity, dispute ratio, refund behavior, and history, with working-capital offers in the merchant portal at bank-defined limits, tenor, and pricing, maker-checker approval, and repayment automated from future settlements
- Loyalty and engagement, including multi-merchant coalition programs
- Consolidated analytics, operational dashboards, and regulatory reporting
- Arabic-first bilingual surfaces with right-to-left throughout, locale-aware formatting, and branded email and SMS
- Integration into core banking, card management, the data warehouse, and your security event platform
- A white-label studio where your team uploads a logo, picks colors, edits the English and Arabic email templates, and watches the merchant portal re-skin live, with users, roles, and notification settings managed per tenant
Embedded, licensed through Determinds
- Payment processing and gateway
- Scheme connectivity across Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Meeza from a single certified connection
- 3D Secure 2.1 and 2.2, with risk-based frictionless routing and exemption rules
- Tokenization with gateway and network tokens, updated automatically when the issuer reissues a card
- Digital wallets: Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay, and Click to Pay, switched on per merchant
- Fraud screening with machine-learning scoring and a rules engine for velocity, geo-blocking, and device fingerprinting, block and allow lists for card, email, IP, and BIN with bulk import, and a case queue with reviewer assignment, SLA timers, and false-positive reporting
- Disputes in one inbox across Visa, Mastercard, and American Express, with each scheme’s deadlines and templates, pre-dispute resolution through Visa RDR, CDRN, and Order Insight, evidence upload with OCR, and win-loss reporting with merchant scorecards by reason code
Every embedded module reaches you and your merchants through D-PAY, under one contract and one accountable team. The processing core is PCI DSS Level 1 and SOC 2 Type II through Visa Acceptance Solutions.
The processing core is swappable
If your institution is a principal member of a different scheme, the processing core can be substituted while the D-PAY layer above it stays unchanged, and our team scopes the substitution with your institution before quoting a timeline.
03 Deployment in detail
Deployment, compliance, and scope
| How long does a deployment take? | Twelve weeks from contract to go-live, with around forty person-days of integration on the bank’s side, and the bank stays acquirer of record under its own license. |
|---|---|
| What does D-PAY add to a payment gateway? | D-PAY embeds the processing core and adds what a gateway alone does not provide: merchant lifecycle, your own back office, local payment rails, merchant financing underwritten from your transaction data, and an Arabic-first merchant experience. Determinds built that layer, and it is what makes an acquiring business succeed in this market. |
| Can we accept other schemes? | Yes, routed through the certified connectivity layer, provided your institution holds acquirer principal membership with that scheme in its own right. Determinds provides the technical path, and your institution holds the membership. |
| Can you host in Egypt? | The D-PAY layer is hosted in Egypt. The embedded processing components are covered by a separate contractual agreement with the scheme’s regional organization, and Determinds settles it as part of the deployment plan. |
| What is out of scope? | Instant account-to-account payment network connectivity, cross-scheme clearing and settlement orchestration, nostro reconciliation, and point-of-sale or software-based terminal acquiring. Determinds logs each of these as a roadmap request. |
04 Where D-PAY differs
Three capabilities built for the Egyptian market
Local rails, properly wired
Fawry bill payments, installment credit through valU, Sympl, and Contact with a single eligibility call across all three, and Meeza QR with local settlement reconciliation. In a market where a large share of payers settle in cash and installments drive conversion, these rails make D-PAY perform in everyday use.
Merchant financing from your own flow
Eligibility derived from collected volume, settlement regularity, dispute ratio, and refund behavior, with working-capital offers in the merchant portal at the limits, tenor, and pricing your bank sets, and repayment taken automatically from future settlements. Your acquiring book becomes your lending pipeline.
Your brand on every surface
Your team uploads a logo, picks the brand colors, and edits the English and Arabic email templates while the merchant portal re-skins in a live preview. Merchants, PSP partners, and risk teams all work in a product that carries your brand with no vendor attribution, and each tenant keeps its own users, roles, and settings.
05 Frequently asked
Questions about D-PAY
Questions a head of cards asks before a deployment starts.
What does a first deployment involve?
A first D-PAY deployment with Determinds takes twelve weeks from contract to go-live, with around forty person-days of integration on the bank’s side against one integration surface, and merchant self-onboarding in fifteen minutes once it is live. An early deployment gets the founders and the engineers who wrote the platform.
Who holds PCI DSS certification for D-PAY?
Determinds is the technology provider, not the certified entity. Certification sits with the financial institution, as it does with any technology vendor. Our systems operate inside our clients’ compliant environments. On D-PAY, the processing core is PCI DSS Level 1 and SOC 2 Type II through Visa Acceptance Solutions, and the bank remains acquirer of record under its own licence.
How is D-PAY different from a payment gateway?
D-PAY embeds the processing layer and adds what a gateway alone does not provide: merchant lifecycle and onboarding, your own back office for operations, risk, and compliance, local payment rails, merchant financing underwritten from your transaction data, and an Arabic-first merchant experience. Determinds built that layer, and it is what makes an acquiring business succeed in this market.
Which schemes and payment methods can we accept?
D-PAY accepts Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Meeza cards through hosted checkout, QR, pay-by-link, and electronic invoicing, alongside Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay, and Click to Pay, Fawry bill payments, and installment credit through valU, Sympl, and Contact. Mastercard, American Express, and Meeza are routed through the certified connectivity layer, provided your institution holds acquirer principal membership with each scheme in its own right. Determinds provides the technical path, and your institution holds the membership.
Can the processing core be changed?
Yes. Determinds designed the processing core to be swappable, so a Mastercard principal can be served by integrating that gateway in place of the current one, with the D-PAY layer above it unchanged. Our team scopes each substitution with the Determinds chief technology officer before quoting a timeline.
Can it be hosted in Egypt?
Yes. The D-PAY layer is hosted in Egypt. The embedded processing components are covered by a separate contractual agreement with the scheme’s regional organization, and Determinds settles it as part of the deployment plan.
What sits outside the current scope?
Instant account-to-account network connectivity, cross-scheme clearing and settlement orchestration, nostro reconciliation, and point-of-sale or software-based terminal acquiring. Determinds logs each of these as a roadmap request.
D-PAY
Work with the founders on an early D-PAY deployment
An early deployment gets the founders and the engineers who wrote D-PAY, working against one integration surface on the bank’s side.