Payment Gateway

A Payment Gateway is a software application or service that securely captures payment data from a customer (e.g., via a website checkout) and transmits it to the acquirer or payment processor.

It acts as the digital equivalent of a physical point-of-sale (POS) terminal. Gateways encrypt sensitive card data (tokenization) to ensure it passes securely between the merchant, the processor, and the networks, keeping the merchant out of PCI compliance scope.