Bank of America Gateway FAQ

A gateway is technology used to allow businesses to accept debit or credit card purchases from customers. The term includes not only the physical card-reading devices found in brick-and-mortar retail stores but also over the phone/mail and payment processing portals found in web-based online shopping stores. 

A gateway provides an entry point into the authorization host which then connects out to the card brands and debit networks. 

Yes, for e-commerce transactions there is encryption between the user’s browser (encode for private use) for exclusive use between seller and buyer for the data submitted at the point of sale. For card present transactions taking place at a brick-and-mortar store there is encryption between the retailer’s point of sale solution and the gateway.

The Bank of America Gateway supports a wide array of integrated payment solutions for point of sale, telephone/mail order and e-commerce payment acceptance. Payment solutions that are offered are based upon your business needs; for example, how do you want to accept transactions (card present, card not present, e-commerce)? What industry are you in? Do you have unique needs (e.g., integration to accounting systems, tip processing, etc.)? Integrated payment solutions connect to the Bank of America Gateway which routes transactions requests and responses to and from the payment networks and back to the payment solution.

In addition to Bank of America’s support of direct processing solutions, we recognize that you may want to use your own third-party vendor to support your point of sale or e-commerce activities. In these cases, Bank of America can work with you to determine if your vendor is already integrated to the Bank of America Gateway, or we can work with the vendor to integrate their devices and or software to our gateway for payment processing.

The Bank of America Gateway E-commerce solution supports US domestic transactions only at this time.