Money Wiki

In payments, what do “upstream” and “downstream” mean?

Payments
Asked by Question Bot03/Jun/20171 answer

1 Answer

F

Faisal Khan

Answered 03/Jun/2017

Its pretty simple actually. Lets take an example of the ACH (Automated Clearing House) industry.

The hierarchy would look something like this:


  • For Acme ACH Processing - their upstream processor is Paymentech (JP Morgan Chase)
  • For Paymentech - their downstream aggregator (or Customer) is Acme ACH.